The poet

 Poetry is a medium for the expression of truth, love, peace, joy, one’s deep pain, hope and dreams. It’s never meant for conveying falsehoods. Falsehoods can be sustained to an extent through prose by going into logical arguments. It comes from the smaller self, the insecure animal trying to survive. But poetry comes from the bigger self; from the soul and its representative, heart. It bypasses the mind. If one conveys falsehoods through poetry that’ll be mere prose written in rhyme.

As the insecure minds unleash wars world over, a poet will keep praying and hope that a soft bud of peace starts to open as the war hysteria touches its peak and would inevitably slide down onwards. Then will bloom a small fragrant flower somewhere among the charms of highland mists.                

The stigmatized superman

 

We keep pseudo-patriotism on our tongues. The shouters; the culinary nationalists tasting the exciting dish of hate, leering with misplaced, mouthwatering pride.

As the super-species ruling the planet, we have created a hierarchy of pain, rights and entitlements. The pain and rights of the non-human manifestations of life are secondary, almost inconsequential, and are taken as the means to fulfill our needs.

No wonder the balance is gone. It’s unsustainable. The birds, plants and animals are rightless. Their loss is meaningless. It opens the way for their destruction. But the fire won’t stop there. It will then start eating we humans. The non-human part of nature is in fact the shield against this fire.

The fungus of distrust

 

A thin film of distrust deposited like limescale on the taphead; yellowness on the teeth; moss on a shadowed musty stone; stains on a toilet seat; permanent smudge of holy paste on an idol’s forehead.

It was coming up slowly, stealthily, the thin film. Then you see it someday—cropped up like fungus on dead wood. You and your partner see it but won’t speak about it. But it’s quite distinct, palpable now. The thin film gets under dust and then with more coatings of dirt turns to a solid concrete wall—the partners working like masons busy in laying their share of bricks, erecting walls. The hard boundaries come into being. Separation. The division of that unity. Fracture.

The wall could have been avoided had both of them done a little bit of daily scrubbing, de-scaling, polishing, rubbing and de-staining to keep it decently clean if not spotlessly clean altogether.

Ma Ganga Doli Yatra

 

When I’m near Gaga Ma I somehow go footloose. Walking on Her banks or on the landscapes shaped by Her torrential flow becomes my meditation, my ritual, my tapasya. I just find myself keep walking. The pent-up energies, emotions, karmic entanglements all start flowing as if pushed by Her blessing shove. I just walk. Gently. In a fine flow with myself. No destination. No goal. She does what is supposed to be done; what is needed for Her child’s growth.

This is late April and I’m staying at Dharali. I’m here to walk with Ma Ganga Doli Yatra from Mukwa to Gangotri—the colorful procession starting from Her winter abode to culminate at Her summer home. It’s a soulful procession, full of colors, redolent with local hill people’s unquestionable faith in Ma Ganga. No words can describe the feeling. The participants in the procession caught in a devotional frenzy. I walk with them and simply keep looking at Her beautiful, kind, pious face visible through the small opening in the little silver shrine being carried by the bearers. I’m just filling myself with as much darshan as possible. Plundering the divine prasad actually. Greedily. Copiously.

It’s a lovely little trek lasting about 22 km. When the procession reaches Gangotri, the entire little pilgrimage town lines up to welcome their mother. The place is as good as nonexistent without Her. No wonder, it’s abandoned during the winter months when the mother is away at Mukwa.

There is a suspension bridge over Ganga Ma linking Dharali on this side to Mukwa on the opposite hill. During nights I keep walking from this end of the bridge to the other. The hill people usually stay indoors after the dark, so I have the bridge all to myself for meditative walks. It’s a spiritually heady cocktail of elements: the mountain wind rushing through the valley, Ma Ganga’s roar, my seeking self and the pristine open starry sky above. All the elements forming a tiny intersection defining my path.

I keep asking people whether they know some real saint to recommend for a meeting. Almost all of them say—with helplessness—that presently it’s all about money, power, authority, perks and privileges; religion is more or less a big business and a political tool now; the babas are powerful and do liaisoning work facilitating big interests of powerful people. But when was it not so? The ritualistic part has always engaged with worldly matters more or less on the base frequency.

I’m more into spirituality. Moreover, this is kaliyuga—the age of darkness. And expecting satyuga purity in kaliyuga sages would be asking too much. To me it’s pretty simple. Earlier in pure climate you had massive trees lasting centuries; now we have lesser trees struggling to survive in the changed climate. The same is the case with the sages in the changed, degraded social climate. They are also the stunted version of the lofty mythical sages of the ancient times. But at least they are carrying the lineage and deserve respect for that. So I’m not too judgmental and usually try to have satsang with kaliyuga saints.

Mahesh, the gentle and kind hotelier, is a thorough gentleman; always ready to do something for the babas and matajis of the entire area from his place to Gangotri. I ask him about any serious baba. He also says with sadness that it’s all business now. ‘But you can try meeting this avadhuta. But it depends on his mood. Usually he asks the visitors to leave within a couple of minutes or straightaway refuses to meet,’ he tells me.

This babaji stays at the other end of the bridge towards Mukwa. As you emerge on the other end of the bridge, the main steep climb goes to Mukwa up the hill. The baba has a tiny hut of planks and tin fixed against a rockface on the left side a few meters above Ma Ganga’s stream. To reach his ramshackle little gate, one has to walk under the bridge along the bank and cross over to the other side of the bridge’s base.

As I reach the tiny indicator of the start of a human’s domain in free wilderness, I see a stocky figure sitting under a tree on a platform in front of the hut. I gently hark his attention from the gate. He waves his hand asking me to come in. I walk gingerly. I’m extra cautious, full of additional politeness in order not to disturb him. As I come near, with a swift action he throws a small durri piece on a beaten down wooden chair near him. I touch his feet and sit at the chair’s edge with folded hands.

‘I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you swami ji. I just wanted to see you. I simply come as an empty vessel. Ready to accept whatever you bless me with,’ I cautiously approach with respect and acceptance of his graceful presence. He laughs with childlike innocence.

I keep my promise of being an empty vessel and just listen. The baba talks. I’m lucky that he is feeling happy to talk today. He is a Begali baba initiated into Ramakrishna mission. But he found the ashrams too binding and has been on his own for the last six decades, most of which he has spent in this area near Ma Ganga including the last 37 years here at this place. Earlier he stayed in a cave about one kilometer up the stream for some years and before that at Gangotri.

He speaks with a cute Bangla accent. Quite hale and hearty for his 77 years. The baba is happy to share his life story and even tells me about his family. It’s a nice satsang for an hour and fifteen minutes. He is quite vocal about a sadhak keeping the vow of celibacy. I have my opinion on this but I know he knows more than me and I must listen to him.

‘O narayan ji, why are you unnecessarily entangled in this worldly maya? Leave it. Quit,’ he says it very naturally like he feels that’s what I should do now. ‘Sit for sadhna. You can sit in my former cave some distance from here. I’ll ask the villagers to help you initially. In any case, what does a sanyasi need? The basic needs are met by mother nature. So you need not worry about that,’ the baba is quite optimistic about me taking full sanyas and abandon all worldly connections.

‘Can’t one achieve peace even while staying in the world with its issues?’ I ask. He says a firm ‘no’ and doesn’t explain it further than this. I have arguments in my talkative mind but I don’t say anything.

Even Kaka Maharaj, who stays outside my village, asked me to abandon everything and sit for sadhna somewhere by the canal in the area where he has been staying for the last many decades. In fact, my brother laughs that I have been offered two penthouses by two babajis. But I know I’m not for complete severance of worldly ties. I’m for a balanced life in all matters. More than that, I believe in reading and writing and that I will do till my last breath. I’m not worried even if that creates situations not conducive to absolute peace. No problem.

‘If you don’t quit, the God will force you to leave all this worldliness, which stops one from enjoying the grace of absolute peace,’ the baba says emphatically. I just clear my throat apologetically.

As I take leave and stoop down to touch his feet, the baba puts his loving, kind hand on my head and gently pats my back saying, ‘Peace be with you! Peace be with you!’ He gives me two apples, a bit stale, dejuiced, somewhat shriveled. Actually all his apples are like that. He isn’t bothered about freshness of fruits. But the fruits are fresh with divine grace.

During our interaction the baba gets a firm idea, and rightly so, that I’m a bookworm. He opens a bundle of soiled cloth and from a stack of very old books randomly picks a part of an old, dog-eared book. ‘Read it! But reading scriptures is like using a thorn to take out the thorn in one’s flesh. After taking out the thorn both thorns have to be discarded,’ he says. The baba knows the utility and futility of knowledge. He is after all a graduate himself.

There I walk back after hitting the jackpot—satsang with a saint, two apples and an old book about the lamp of knowledge. The rumpled, crumpled book has been thoroughly thumbed; possibly during his former knowledge-seeking days. The thorn of knowledge which he used to pull out the thorn of ignorance. The pages bear extensive markings, underlines, sidenotes and scrawls in Bangla to give me an idea how extensively babaji has gone through this book. He seems to have gone into depths over each world and phrase on the banks of Ganga Ma over the decades.

This is a prized catch—in worldly lingo. I might not be able to read it as extensively as the baba but its mere presence among my books is enough to dispel the dark corners of ignorance in my study. It’s enlightening just by its presence. How it can’t be? After all, it has stayed in the hands of such a longtime sadhak who has definitely attained a joyful state. I feel that joyfulness in my head now. A feeling of ease. Palpable. Not many ideas swimming in the brainy pool. Just an emptiness. I feel the grace of his peaceful touch as I walk back.

Yea, missed to tell it. The baba listens with the cute excitement of a child listening to fairy tales. I was telling him the story of a Zen monk and he looked and listened in rapt attention, a childlike smile on his face all along the narration.

Life in a little courtyard

 

The champa shrub—though I prefer to call it a tiny tree—is squeezed between a wall and a domineering parijat. But even in the limited space the tiny tree with green stems and mossy-green long and sturdy leaves gave its best and sprung many lateral shoots. But the monkeys would love to break the green stems. Maybe they love the distinct juicy thudding sound when the stem or branch snaps. It’s quite distinct from the breaking sound of any other tree’s branch, which is high-pitched and tangy in feel.

So the plant grew slim and shot through the narrow opening between the parijat and the wall. It has a little canopy now, and in harmony with surprisingly plenty May rains, it’s redolent with seven bunches of lovely white flowers having a scented yellow core. They have a very gently, yet quite effective, wafting smell. Shaken by the wind the flowers keep falling through the day. Each time I pick a flower it seems like a gift. When I’m feeling lethargic I put a few of them on my palm and inhale the smell from close quarters. It changes the mood drastically, making me clear headed instantly.

The parijat has shed all its leaves. It looks forlorn with dry seedpods at the end of dead fringes of dried branches and boughs. A death before getting reborn. The hardworking champa has shown enough resilience in blossoming so many smiles despite the challenges it has faced. It deserves a reward. A reward for staying there as an optimist despite monkey mischief and limited space.

I clear a few dry twigs and branches on the parijat to give a little bit of extra open sky to the lovely sprinkler of smiles. Well, if you keep trying to bloom and grow despite the roadblocks, you reach a point where someone or something will be there to help you. But for that to happen you have to keep going and reach that point.

The little birdie lad

 

It’s a tailorbird boy. I remember it tagging around its parents among the garden plants, its parents shouting the moment you stepped into the zone where it was hiding. That was during the winters and it was really smart of them to keep their chick out of the dining table of the brown female feral cat that sunned itself on the premises. Now in this early May heat I think the adolescent tailorbird chick is on its own. I don’t think it goes out of the garden walls. It has enough among the plants and trees in the yard to meet its dietary requirements.

The boy tailorbird has chosen an interesting place to sleep during the night. There is an iron hook in the once barn wall—now housing my dented old car instead of mother’s buffalos and cows—about five feet from the ground. From it hangs a dusted polybag having dried flowers meant to be used as seeds next spring and a couple of thin rubber tubes hanging in loops. And in one loop there it perches for the night.

The birdie boy retires early for the day, when it’s still bright enough to see it sitting at its place. It doesn’t mind our moving around the perch on our normal routine tasks. But it has almost crashed into my nose a couple of times when I inadvertently went too close to its house.

At night it almost mixes with the surroundings by raising its fluffy fur and drawing itself into a little ball. Since it’s an adolescent boy, it’ll be a dashing handsome man by the time the monsoons arrive a couple of months down the line. I hope by that time it will be grown enough to have a partner.

The cute corridor of creativity

 

I go and pick-up my niece from the university hostel over the weekends. The last spring was a special one on the campus. The head gardener was a man who loved his job—the result was a beautiful flowery world; rows and rows of healthy, well-cared flowers. The flowers danced, smiled, grew old and died under the merciless April sun that followed the short north Indian spring.

I picked up many varieties of dry flowers to store and use them as seeds during the next season. My little garden is overloaded with plants and trees. The only space available was in the pots of rose plants, about a dozen of them. This January I mixed the seeds with soil and dung manure and layered them in the pots having single rose plants. There they came out heralding a lovely spring.

Hundreds of chamomiles, a daisy like small flower with little white petals around a yellow core, waved at me in February and March. Chamomile is a lovely flower, which is used as flavoring agent in food and beverages. There were so many of them in the crowded little space in the pots. The space was limited but they gave their best. They couldn’t grow to full length but even the tiniest ones among them smiled and offered a flower to some lone bee or butterfly. The chamomiles had beaten all other varieties to bloom as a colony.

The present university gardener doesn’t seem too sincere about his job as can be guessed from the absence of flowers save for some marigolds. I think the chamomile angels attracted the fancy of a poet and carried the survival of their colony in his little yard. I saw some honeybees among the chamomiles. At least some tiny honeycomb somewhere not too far!

The chamomiles dazzled for almost two months and died under hot April sun, their withering looks asking me to preserve their seeds for the next season. I did as asked.

I pull out the dry stalks carefully avoiding injuring the stunted growth of gaillardia grandiflora (blanket flower) which had been trying to seek a way out of the dense crop of chamomiles. There we have the runner up. A few green leafy sprouts of blanket flowers now growing hurriedly to make the most of whatever the season has to offer. Their soft leafy sprouts had been struggling to come out and kiss the air above and dazzle their smiles.

Within a week of the clearing around them one of them smiled its ornamental orange red smile. So they occupy the second position. It’s a hybrid plant in the sunflower family. I have put the pots under the shade to allow dozens of them to smile even in this heat. These are brave flowers.

I hope some lone flower of some other variety will also blossom up to claim the third position. Sometimes just being there earns you a standing among the top three. So come on you some lone ranger, plow your way up!

Astrology: The shaky, semi-art and smart craft

 

Nostradamus… Baba Venga… What to say about their predictions? In my humble opinion, which is inspired by what great Osho said on the subject, it’s about recognizing the cyclic pattern of major types of events and the chief types of characters involved in them. It would obviously fit with later events and the people involved in bringing them into effect.

See, there is a cyclical pattern in wars, like small wars occurring after so many years and bigger wars happening after roughly a particular number of smaller cycles of time. And all the violent leaders have a particular type of personality, which can be easily guessed because all of them are cut from the same fabric.

So these so-called future forecasters, they don’t have godly insights to see things in advance. They have practical knowledge of the cyclical pattern of major types of events and the mind and personality types of the leaders who get engaged in these events. So obviously what they forecast in advance will have some matching with the events that follow and the leaders involved in them. It’s a very practical art or rather skill.

The same goes for all astrologers and the science of astrology.

The pregnant cat

 

A bookish stilt in my attitudional accent. It’s a precarious poetic perch. Spirits dampened with driftless destiny. Exasperating decadence strewn around. The world lost in the lore of gladiatorial guts and bloody gore. Thankfully my yard and small garden possess a stageful dignity; a small world having its deference-deserving dust.

The brown and yellow striped cat is commodiously pregnant. The would-be mother is relaxing with a rotund belly. A cat has exemplary excellence in the art of relaxation, almost perfect ease. And from this arises an esteemed sense of alertness. A sepulchral silence out of which are born swift darts at the prey. Extremely relaxed, extremely alert. Latching onto the productive strains of providence whenever the slightest chance opens.

The flycatcher voicing frilly thoughts; convulsive nerves of the tailorbird; churlishly blinkering babblers. They see the cat relaxing. It has lost its agility but it needs to eat till the day of delivery. For its kittens. Lackadaisical attitude won’t do. Aha the eminent rhythms of motherhood! And there it jumps up suddenly and runs across the courtyard towards the garden, galloping with a stately mix of firmness and gentleness. It has undertaken eight or ten such runs to catch some lazy bird or squirrel. It wants some meaty delicacy which we can’t offer. Chapattis and milk it doesn’t prefer, a feral cat it’s after all. So it wants to hunt for its kittens in its belly.

When you see a pregnant female, across all species, it breeds natural respect for her. You might not be actually aware of it, but when you give a look of respect, or hold out a helping hand, or get up from your seat to offer it to her, you are performing a deeply religious act. It’s almost like a holy ritual. Usually when I see a bird or cat after a prey, I impulsively intervene from the prey’s side. But not this time. Scaring her away from her hunting pursuit in such a heavily pregnant state feels like something unholy. I just leave it to fate and watch it as it unfolds.

Honeybees on a poet's head

 

Bookish guys are usually lazy. Poetic in a practical world; grandly aloof, musing over time’s mossy transience. So I find myself congratulating India for its digital platforms to provide online financial and administrative services. I’m elated the moment I come to know that I need not go to the district court premises to get my driving license (DL) renewed. It can be done online. It feels like a gift. Wow! So I apply in high spirits. I pay the fees and upload all the required documents. Now I just have to wait for a brand new DL. I keep checking for the latest status of my application. But the process doesn’t move ahead. It shows the same ‘document scrutiny’ stage for more than three weeks. So I go to the district mini-secretariat with all my application printouts in a file, just like one does in an offline application.

As I’m walking towards the e-Disha Kendra, located on the sprawling district secretariat campus, a man comes running. ‘Bumblebees are here! They are attacking people!’ he shouts a warning to me. I see big bumblebees reconnoitering the air for human enemies. I take a turn and start moving away by the side of the block towards the more crowded place of steno kiosks, notaries and lawyer chambers. The ratio of the enemies per bee would be high there. They have targeted a man. He is crying for help, flailing his arms to ward them off. They are biting him with more force in greater numbers. It’s like getting stuck in a quagmire. The more you flail your limbs, the more you get stung.

Someone has started a smoky fire to deter the natural drone attackers, known for their volatile temper and painful stings. Two soldier bees are stuck in my hair on top of head on the right side. They furiously buzz their wings. I know the rule. Never move your hands to ward them off. If you do so, you are instantly locked as the target and hundreds of bee fighters would attack you. So I walk like Dr. Manmohan Singh, keeping my arms stuck to my sides, not moving my torso in any direction or angle. The disciplined, non-threatening walk of an academician.

I can hear the man who has been attacked shouting, ‘Hai they are eating me, please save me!’ You can hardly do anything to help someone in this situation even with the best of your philanthropic emotions. The bees in my hair are angrily buzzing but I keep my arms jutted to my sides. Dozens are hovering around me. The moment I swipe my hand to get the bees off my head, they will pin me down as the next target. When I feel that I’m safe in a narrow corridor I start brushing with a soft hand, my fingertips barely touching the hair, to get the bees away. They unleash the entire stock in their weaponry on my head. Bumblebees sting very painfully. For an instant I go numb with pain. But I’m successful in getting rid of them. Thankfully I haven’t been spotted striking their soldier friends by the other bees.

I hastily cross a narrow strip of lawn between the blocks to move towards another section, the older blocks which aren’t spacious and airy like the one that I have just crossed. It’s an old, claustrophobic, musty, rusty maze. It makes me feel more secure as I move into its outer corridor.

An old man and an old woman, husband and wife visiting the courts for some official work, emerge from the new, spacious block. The bees have entered its main lobby. The old couple has broken the rule. They are panicked and vigorously waving their hands above their head and around their face to keep the bees off. Hundreds are hovering around them attacking and stinging at free will. To make it still worse for the man (in comparison to his wife, who is waving just hands), he is forcefully waving a cloth in the air around him. It invites bigger attacks. The woman shouts feeble cries for help. The man is simply focused on beating with the piece of cloth. They are tired. They walk a few steps and sit on the ground almost giving into the bees.

Everyone is at a loss about what to do. I shout and ask them to keep moving towards our side. The man seems to have surrendered. He can barely walk. The woman performs slightly better. She keeps pleading in a helpless tone, ‘Pour water! Pour water on us!’ But where is water? I feel utterly helpless. What to do? I can feel their pain but what to do. A young man comes rushing out from the new block. He is waving a black piece of cloth around him to avoid getting stung. He has a mosquito repellent spray bottle in hand. The bees attack him also. He is spraying clouds of mosquito repellent around the old man. But it’s almost ineffective.

Our family has a history of death due to bumblebee stings. My great grandfather was attacked by an entire swarm of bumblebees while returning from the fields after a hard day of tilling land. It was early 1890s and there was hardly any medical facility in the village at that time. He died because of excessive swelling which the village hakeem couldn’t manage. I feel on the upper right side of my head. There are two lumps. The crown of my head is numb.

The faces of the old couple are blood red due to multiple stings. By this time they seem to have given up to fate. You want to help but how? There must surely be better and more efficient ways of managing a bumblebee attack. At least I don’t have any clue. Neither has the district administration.

It’s a weighty fact that someone can be almost drawn to the portals of death right there in the middle of district administration centre, the axis of local police, judiciary and bureaucracy. Where you have the district collector, police superintendent, magistrates and judges. But the powerful authority is clueless as to how to help an old couple getting painfully stung by hundreds of bumblebees, crying for help while slowly moving from one block to the other. The response is just to watch, wait and allow the bees to stop stinging. Big cars, sirens, gun-toting guards, arrogance, systematic loot and plunder. All helpless in the face of a bee attack. The officers, judges and magistrates must be watching from safe, sealed windows.

The bees keep attacking the old man even while he has reached the crowded notary stalls. Finally the attacking squad dissipates. Someone takes the old couple to the hospital. I hope they have injections against bee bites. A thin plume of smoke is splaying the air as disaster management response.

I enter the block where my file needs to be submitted. There I stand with two lumps on my head holding an offline folder as a follow-up to the online application. I complain why wasn’t document verification done since I have uploaded all the required documents and the website says I need not visit the office physically. ‘Because you didn’t submit the file,’ the woman tells my curtly. ‘Then what’s the difference between offline application and online application?’ I’m about to ask. But I think the better of it. She might get offended and raise some unnecessary issue about the file, requiring more visits. So I keep mum and enjoy the offline process after having completed the digital version.

The police batons falling on a sack of potatoes

 

Rashe Ram smokes weed. Eats lots of chapattis. Works like a beast as a daily wage earner. On top of that he hasn’t got a mind bugged with over-thinking. So he is hefty and relaxed. There are many in the village who share his weed-filled beedis for free. He gets it from the slum areas in Bawana and after meeting his personal needs sells the extra stuff at a very small margin of profit. If we take into account what others smoke for free from him, it’s a no profit no loss venture. Still he is a weed seller in the eyes of law.

Someone informs upon him. The police pick him up. The cops basically beat the vagrants, giving prodigious pain to body as well as ego. They enjoy both. They love taking bribe as well and let out the beaten guy after making his wallet weightless. But in the case of Rashe Ram they instantly realize that there is hardly anything to be drawn out of his wallet. So this source of pleasure is gone. They take recourse to the other—beating. Normally, in case of routine offenders, it gives the policemen a sadistic pleasure to see their ego melting and identity crumbling. But unluckily for the police, Rashe Ram’s detached self is beyond the bruises of ego. So as they thrash him, very soon they realize there is hardly any fun in beating this guy. Just plain wastage of energy. It’s like hitting a wall, or some street bull at the most. They can feel that their strikes aren’t penetrating beyond his thick skin. It feels like they have been beating a big heap of sack cloth. The policemen feel cheated. They just throw him out to get rid of him.

The sad semal tree

 

I’m walking on my solitary. A lot has changed in the last three-four years. Then it was a little ribbon of wilderness running through agricultural fields, flanked by two canals and the foot track overgrown with trees, reeds, shrubs and bushes. It gave the feeling of a forest walk. To ease the removal of silt from the canals the trees have been cut, the reeds and grass mowed down. Just a few big trees remain. So now it’s like walking on a big field embankment. The blasting human population is finding it increasingly difficult to find more resources.

It’s late March. The wheat crop has a golden hue and moving fast towards harvesting. The evening heat seems to be stewing a fragrance of grass and wild flowers. Heaps of silt have been dredged from the canals and line the trail like March flowers once used to dot the path. The sand and silt is a lucrative business. The wild flowers just inspire some poems in a poet. I accept the change, the inevitable master of earthly ceremonies. I smell the lovely fragrance of whatever is left. A heady smell of honey sweetens the mood. Some lone honeycomb nearby on a peepal tree!  

And there stands the mourning tree. It was once a huge, luxurious semal (silk cotton tree). In March and April it used to smile with big, red, luscious flowers. Then the sand mafia came. Greedy for the river silt piled around the tree, they scraped away earth, cutting its big roots. The tree survived somehow. But it hasn’t smiled even once, not a single flower, during the last two years. And now when the spring is at its peak and flowers are abloom on uninjured semal trees somewhere else, this sad tree stands without even a single leaf, forget about flowers. It’s its way of showing its mourning over the loss. It still greets me with its sad barren silhouette. I feel its pain. With a little extension of our sensitivity, we can feel and be aware of the joys and sorrows of the non-human component of life on earth. The flowers are their smiles. The blobs of sap oozing from the cuts on the bark are their tears. Their luxurious canopy swaying to the winds is their dance. The ripe fruits, shadow and fresh air is their kindness. It’s all there. We just need to be aware of it.

I put my hand on its hard bark. A handshake. An acknowledgment of the humans’ rapacious ways. I feel sorry from the side of the humans. ‘Don’t worry, I am trying to smile with flowers and one fine day I will welcome you on this solitary trail with my red blooms!’ it seems to say. Well, best of luck you fighter tree. You are injured but big and strong. Keep your faith alive. Let’s hope for the best during the next spring. And till then our handshakes and greetings continue. Let this friendship stay fresh in my heart and your wooden tissues. It’s a lovely friendship and I’m honored to be your friend, privileged to feel your pain and would be joyous in sharing your spring smiles.

Superstition--the great leveler

 

Superstitions will have easy takers among the people of different nationalities, races, religions, ethnicities, classes, castes. We will easily fight over different gods and geographies. But when it comes to superstitions we drop the guard. A Hindu will take Muslim superstitions to ward off the evil eye. Because all of us carry the same primal fear. In the brotherhood of fear, we are just the same little children. It’s the same reaction. Like a well-organized and tidy person of any religion or nationality winces with the same reaction after cutting on the soft inside of his cheek.

The dreamy game of creation

 

‘Nothing’ wants to be ‘something’. The eternal emptiness is forever seeking to be impregnated with something (temporary). The endless flow of emptiness (eternal) briefly sparkles as a stream of water. Carrying its fluid independence, shaped by circumstances, moving without any ego constraints, following the natural free-flowing law of its mother, the stream of eternal emptiness. The line of water also has a smaller empty womb pregnant with a broad set of possibilities (but still limited in comparison to the eternal mother). It sires a still limited manifestation of the free eternal flow—a snake. The snake is a more conscious replica of its mother stream having flesh and bones. It’s still further away from the free flow (water), just like water itself is away from the mother stream of eternal emptiness. The fluidity and freedom of its crawl is curtailed by the impulsive fears and struggle for survival because it has to maintain its structural elements.

Similarly, from the eternal empty float of ‘nothingness’, the air manifests with smaller freedoms than its mother. Out of air the birds manifest and fly with still lesser free flow than the mother component. The grandchildren of the grand eternal ‘nothing’ have lesser and lesser element of free flow with the coming of new generations. The eternal simplicity turning more and more complex.

The eternal ‘nothing’ becomes earth, the earth becomes trees. From the eternal grand simplicity to a structural sophistication in each new generation. But this drive towards sophisticated manifestation—from eternal emptiness to rudimentary elemental structuring to complex restructuring further down the line—is like setting up check-dams of restraint upon the infinite force of eternal ‘nothing’. It’s a channelization for smaller streams.

An evolutionary path: the Big Bang, galaxies collapsing, black holes eating stars up the stream to a small wild flower and a honeybee hovering over it down the line. The blinding fury of the infinite now channelized to a beautiful little fragrant stream. The species like humans—who have a relatively bigger capability to channelize the little streams—have a special responsibility to take it further down the path of lovelier manifestations. A human blooming flowers is far more in symmetry with the eternal flow than the human who is making nuclear bombs to create more destructive forces. It’s like going back to the primal age of infinitely destructive forces.

This existence has already seen too many explosions happening of its own in faraway galaxies. It can definitely do without our little childish firecrackers. Evolution is to take us more and more away from the destructive forces. Because we have started from super-massive galactic bangs. Making weapons to create more death and destruction instead of helping evolve more and more beauty is like going back into the fire we started from. Let’s add to the beauty. Let there be sunshine on the layers of foggy illusions. Let there be more flowers and trees. Let there be a heaven on the earth where callused hands enjoy delicious fresh food and exquisite wine. Let’s accept that wisdom is basically about silence and just a tiny fraction of essential words. Let’s accept the commonality, our shared being. Let’s acknowledge the entangled roots that we have. Let’s be sensitive to the perceptible and imperceptible flow of pain in our veins. We carry the joys and sorrows of our ancestor forests in our body. Let’s feel it and be aware of it. That’s the soil that nurtured us.     

A little specimen of village childhood

 

Here are a few snippets from Shekhar’s illustrious life. In school the best piece of writing he accomplished (far better than any exam he wrote) was a  letter he wrote to his armyman father. His illiterate mother dictated the contents. The basic idea was about conveying his undisciplined, errant ways that were in reverse direction to all that was taught at the village school. It was to be concluded with a request to give him a spanking when his father arrived for his annual vacations.

He was ten or eleven at that time. She thought he wasn’t smart enough to temper with the contents at such a delicate age. But she was mistaken. Shekhar remembered at least the essence of antonyms taught at the school. So he wrote the opposite stating he was a good boy giving details of his obedient ways in school and nice helping tasks he performed at home. And all this, the letter concluded, entitles him to a prize, a cricket bat. So a couple of months later his proud father arrived with a cricket bat. But first it was used on his bum once he came to know about the truth.

Shekhar possessed great treasurer qualities. His clay moneybox full of coins, he was looking for the safest place to keep it hidden from his siblings and other thieves prowling the village streets. At dusk he went to the shrubbery outside the village, serving as open public toilet, dug a hole, put the treasure inside, placed the soil back, padded it quite firmly and put the locker of his defecation on the top as a firm seal of inviolable property.

He loved money and even at a delicate age understood that it takes lots of efforts to earn wealth. Ajit was a few years elder to him. He was tossing a one rupee coin with malicious glee. He was testing the money-making guts of the village brats. He pointed out a farmer’s big heap of defecation and challenged anyone to strike it down with a fist blow and earn the top prize.

Even the most rascally ones gave in. Not Shekhar. He made a ball of fist with his left hand, kissed the curled little finger at the base and struck with purpose and force, with enough power so that there was no space for the bet-maker to cry foul. The heap was flattened. He had a dirty left hand. ‘In any case it does the same every morning!’ he consoled the shocked group of brats around. After that he bathed in the village pond for half an hour holding the prize money in his right hand.

Apart from running his barber shop he manages a tiny dairy unit. It involves three or four cows whose milk his wife sells to get her share of pocket money to feel economically independent. There are plenty of gau and nandi shalas in the countryside where the farmers leave the surplus calves. It was a male calf that Shekhar had to leave at the cow shelter. Named Sanda, the baby bull was much pampered by Shekhar’s family.

Shekhar was very sad to leave it in the cramped space full of bulls of all sizes ranging from Hercules to motes. From behind the grills, they competed to eat donated chapattis, jaggery and other cattle feed. After a fortnight Shekhar committed the mistake of crossing over into the yard and call Sanda affectionately with a piece of jaggery in his hand. It recognized him and ran like a child rushing to meet his father. But a huge-horned bull got offended and as if accusing him of favoritism ran after him. When he jumped over the wall he felt a rough graze of cattle horn on his bum. It was a close save.

Dazed democracies

 

The democratic world is in a crisis. The concept of freedom is warping due to the tug-of-war between liberals and conservatives within the democracies. As per the latest trends, the far-right radicals are targeting the leftist liberals as if they are the scourge of democracy.

Radical conservatives are becoming more popular. The conservative leaders are basically the showmen playing with the jugglery of rightist ideologies. Their swashbuckling hysterics create excitement and passion among the masses on the basis of religion, nationality, immigration, or anything that can create insecurity and false pride in the masses. They sell dreams in hyperbolic terms. Jingoism. Drama. Lots of noise. Nothing much is done on the ground. But in shouting, yelling and raising banners, the people think they are contributing to make their nation great.

The leftist liberals accomplish far more things at a natural pace, bring out real change. But all this may go down as nonperformance given their subdued intonation. A classic example is the work style of PM Manmohan Singh and PM Modi. The former with his unassuming persona actually brought about real effective change on the surface. The latter has built a high-pitched public avatar of himself, which is disproportionally too big for the little change that has actually happened on the ground for the common man.

The major world democracies are shifting to radical rightist control under powerful monopolist leaders who find democratic institutions and consensual obligations too limited and confining to operate. They are pushing at the edges of democracy to give it a new shape. They are spreading their cult to the fringes of electoral autocracy. The spirit of democracy is seriously strained. The far right conservatives are looking to melt the democratic iron fence and take their newly created space to meet China-type communist authoritarianism.

These macho leaders feel suffocated by the checks and balances of democratic institutions. They find the leftist liberals bigger enemies even than the non-democratic authoritarian rulers. No wonder, one can feel that Trump and Modi are more at ease with Xi and Putin.

Democracy seems like a bloated amoeba. A part of it (the rightist conservatives) is trying to cut itself off from the main body and merge with the authoritarian regime. And in countries where this is happening, the people are slowly getting habituated to a new set-up. They still believe that it’s the very same old democracy. It’s out of habit that they still believe that nothing has changed even though so many things have changed gradually just in a decade. The fundamental character of once autonomous institutions is slowly giving way to a new normal where their political misuse is the new norm.

Oligarchs—in both democratic and authoritarian world—are in close brotherhood across the ideological divides. They are like a dismembered amoeba, having different limbs in different countries but still sharing the same soul even though there is no physical contact. They are a great cementing bond between the far right democratic politicians and the dictators in shadow regimes. Oligarchs would always prefer a closed, manipulated politico-economic system. It’s beneficial to their unique regime. No wonder they would naturally support and finance radical, rightist authoritarian leaders who will mold the economic environment for oligarchy’s smooth passage.

The colors within

 

Mid-March musings in celebration of colorful Holi spirit. Mother nature itself busy in springtime festivity of flowers, fresh shoots, verdant leaves.

Can you ever give something that you don’t possess to someone? No. To give a coin to someone, you first need to have it in your possession. We can really give something to someone only if we have it. Otherwise, we just pretend to give and such fake offerings are laid bare sooner or later.

How will one give love, joy, companionship, peace, support and guidance to someone unless he/she already possesses them? So own these things first and then offer them to someone. In relationships we assume that we are there to give these things to the other person. While mostly we ourselves don’t possess them. So we pretend that we are a real giver. While in reality we are in need of these very things. Imagine a situation where two takers are pretending to be givers.

An honest taker is better than a false giver. So be an honest taker, full of gratitude and acceptance, while you work on the lovely stock of joy and peace in your possession. And then one fine day offer it to someone in the form of a relationship. If you still have some surplus left with you, it will flow out of you in the form of grand emotions, art, poetry, healing words. Or say, your presence itself will become a conduit for the outflow of peace and harmony around you.

So blossom the colorful orchard of fragrant flowers within your self first. That is what Holi is about. Once we have the lovely garden in our persona, the bees and butterflies will come kissing the smell riding the air. Wish you all the vibrant, natural colors of humanity in your persona! Happy Holi!   

The small lamp of truth--Taoism

 

This is something in celebration of the Taoists. The great sage Lao Tzu maintained that real knowing is to know that the unknowable can’t be known. It leaves one with a clean slate at every instant, despite all the knowledge, information and analysis accumulated so far. It makes one an eternal learner, not learned. One flows with the flow. There is so much to learn at every instant, still one stays empty—an empty vessel where mother existence pours down a fraction of existence and a lovely unique manifestation happens. I’m glad that there are people who are in harmony with the Tao even in this post-modernist clatter and chatter!

The grating moan of self-loath

 

Self-loath is the genesis of all the hatred pouring out of us. It’s the seed that lies deep in us nurtured by the manure of guilt, sense of failure, shortcomings, and the things that make us feel incomplete. It grows and acquires its domain over those around us. We can’t hate anyone unless we ourselves hate a part of us. We just project it on others. The others just make us realize the existence of that hate deep in us.

In the same vein, those deeply in self-love will be able to carry it over to others. Otherwise, we are just trying to forget our own self-loath for some time in the form of a relationship. So fall in love with yourself. Go so deep that you become all love. Then your relationships won’t be a mere need. They become natural bonds like the sunlight has with a flower.

A perfect day in spring

 

A perfect spring day in the first week of March. An utterly wonderful day poised between contrariness of hot and cold creating a tremulous ceasefire between the two. The sun unceasingly bright with a steady radiance. A cold wind cutting the warm fabric of sunshine. Mother nature crossing the fords to bloom fully. An idealized conception between hot and cold. A lovely liaison between father sun and mother earth. A pulsation of procreation. The balance lying in a mystery box teasing with tender inaccessibility. The sky bright blue shimmering with celestial wholesomeness. Restarting of a frozen flow; a blooming up after the winters. The air carrying courtesy, cordiality, felicity.

New leaves emerging with easeful proficiency. Buds opening fascinatingly, artfully. Flowers blooming as angelic personification of some cosmic urge to smile. The butterflies will soon arrive with the message that life is all beauty and honey. A sort of fullness flooding a rose as it maximizes its potential to bloom and happily scatter its petals to a gust of wind—a painless dissolution. A flower smiling rapturously with youth. The trees waving their branches with stately majesty in the wind. A leaf fluttering tremulously.

The squeaky falsetto of a purple sunbird. Maybe the female prodding the male with questions. Plentiful squeals of a tailorbird. Bewildering, chit-chatty sonority of sparrows as a flock. Velvety, marvelous smile on a maiden freshest with love. The shambling gallop of an old dog feeling young in spirit. At the zenith of their resolution, the trees and plants having survived the winters, now getting rewarded with new shoots and saplings. Mother nature watching with methodical magnanimity. Everyone looking up to the future having ridden themselves of the lacerating recollections of the past. Enlivening. Invigorating.