A kind farmer

 

There was a 250-year-old banyan tree. It stood on a parcel of land owned by a farmer named Balbir Singh. The land was acquired by the NHAI for road construction. The farmer tried to save the tree and requested to let the tree stay at its original place and divert the road a bit.

The kindly farmer had absolutely no problem about his land being acquired for building roads. He just wanted to save the tree. He was ready to offer more land for development provided the highway was re-routed to save the tree.

He told them that the tree would look beautiful as a landmark. But they didn’t listen to him. The roads go straight with a dreadful effrontery. Mere trees are just insignificantly irksome. The roads, on the other hand, are the swords cutting distances. They are cold hearted and cut trees, hills and homes in their wake. Unsparing insentient beings.

All his efforts to save the ancient tree went unheeded. The farmer really loved the tree and requested the authorities to replant the tree at a suitable place. He launched a campaign to force the authorities to replant it at a place of his choice.

A social media campaign was started to save the tree. Many activists, NGOs and volunteers also added their voice of support. They even reached the doorsteps of the local Member of Parliament.

His efforts at least convinced the authorities to relocate the tree to another place in his landholding. The NHAI officials, the local administration, horticulture experts and land acquisition authorities assured him that they would try their best to expertly uproot the tree and replant it at a different place. He was clearly given a word that the tree would surely survive after the scientific relocation.

He chose his own land for the grand old tree’s replanting and became the axis of the replanting drive. The administration kept emphasizing that the roots would be intact and the tree will be grafted using all the scientific practices to ensure it will re-grow.

Sadly, even after a good monsoon came and went, the tree didn’t grow a single new shoot. The farmer himself watered the replanted tree and took ample care. Even the horticulture experts visited frequently for follow-up steps. But the tree didn’t sprout.

The farmer is feeling let down by the authorities. He is thinking of taking them to the court for making a false promise and breach of trust. Kisan Unions and environmentalists have been lending their voice in support of the farmer.

The farmer sees the tree as a legacy for his progeny. His ancestors had worked hard in the fields and rested under its shade. The tree was the pride of the village and was said to be planted by some Muslim family in pre-independent India. He fondly reminisces that cattle, animals, birds and humans took shelter under it in the scorching heat.

Well, it’s a glimmer of hope that there are people around who love trees more than the commerce of land. The cherry-toned whisper of love for nature in this post-modernist bewilderment. The soft-springed gait amidst the collective floundering rush towards the precipice overlooking a still nastier abyss. 

The entangled mirages of the mind

 

We always have a highly exaggerated sense of problems, tough situations and challenges. Our primal fears and insecurities stretch the minor possibilities of negatives to make them babbling pools of consternation and imaginary worst-case scenarios.

Highly exaggerated assumption of problems acquires the shape of a wall between us and the people over there. Testily we lose trust in people. In the throes of approbation, we glutter and stutter and become so insecure that we feel ourselves to be at everyone’s target around us.

This is plain paranoia. A causeless encumbrance. The journey quavering and the path trackless. Smothered by impulses the journeyman gasps for the air of truth (reality).

Just look into the past experiences of your life, you will find that mostly we acted on the impulse of being defensive or offensive imagining the worst-case scenario. But our ego will take credit that by acting in that manner we nullified the chances of that common threat from acquiring a nasty shape.

The simple fact is—we imagine a disproportionately big problem or situation and then we take credit for that thing not happening.

It’s all in the mind. Balance is the way out, as Buddha says. Balance will tell us to be cautious to what extent. It helps in having a realistic and logical threat assessment. Then our system doesn’t go into an overdrive due to the panic-button’s trigger.

I know it’s very difficult to beat these impulses. But we can practice to remember that most of the time our fears are overblown; that things are pretty normal most of the time after the brief sandstorms. Situational sandstorms are the moments that need a pause and composure with eyes closed. Haggard, impulsive and stifled look doesn’t help. There is no need to eat dust and getting blinded by the sand. The sandstorms surely die. Just remember this.     

Things aren’t tangled generally. They are just slightly out of order. Like the cord or chain of the necklace or amulet worn around one’s neck. Just a tiny incongruity. Meagerly abashed. It’s our chaotic effort that turns a slightly tricky loop into an irresolvable knot by randomly, indignantly pulling from chance directions. Chaos and disorder born of just pulling by chance. If we just hold it and allow it to untangle itself, it falls into place by itself.

Similarly, most of the time, the seemingly tough situations are simply slightly tricky loops. It’s we who pull at them randomly and discordantly, driven by impulses and reactions, and turn them into tight knots which are very difficult to undo.

An apparently tangled cord has very small wrong turns. But our reactionary effort, plentitudes of vexations, assortment of anxieties, faculties prostrating to the imagined fears, fearful fancies and silly suppositions put it into very tight knots and mess it up.     

The hierarchy

 

It’s a pyramidal socio-economic structure. At its any given point, there are less (in numbers) luckier people above and more (in numbers) unluckier ones below. That’s almost a natural law.

Prosperity softly narrowing down to a point at the apex; poverty and misery broadening to cover the entire earth. The ribald splutters of some unjustifiable, cruel derivation of the unknown cosmic laws. Millions on the burning, hammering anvil as a prelude to small shapes of luck for the chosen few. And mother existence looking with a kind of pre-selected apathy. Mass austerity for little lucrative fates.

Wherever you are placed, just analyze your standing in socio-economic terms. You will find that for dozens of luckier people (let’s say better placed people—both on account of inheritance and hard work), there are hundreds who are placed lower than you mostly by the accidents of birth, by being born in more challenging situations. Wherever you are situated, you are still standing on the soil of myriads of unluckier fates.

The baseline comprises teeming billions who are cast in the same mould of poverty, hunger, misery and numerous other disadvantages. They symbolize loss and pain itself. They are the benchmark. They have the luckier and unluckier ones only among themselves. There is absolutely no one below them as a class or group. They are the base field for any windfall, any successful parley, any congratulatory word buzzing around, any precursor to smile, any tiny step leading to quantum leap, any ounce of progress, growth and development in the world above them. They are the broad canvas of pain on which a few pictures of pleasure are drawn by the unknown hand. 

The same applies for the few odd people at the pyramid’s apex. They have nothing to look up above their heads. The well-heeled elitists can just look within their peer group for some relative perspectives. But for the majority in the pyramid, it’s just dozens of luckier people and thousands of unluckier ones.

 

Afghanistan is a beautiful but bloodied land. So many dreams die even before they take birth. But a 13-year-old boy dreamt big and high. He took a gutsy step to fulfill his dream of going to Iran. A brusque and curt plan propelled by boyhood’s innocence where there is hardly any difference between facts and fancy.

On a promising Sunday morning, dressed in white kurta-pyjama, he managed to sneak into Kabul airport and got mixed in a queue of passengers going to board a plane and occupied his free, unauthorized seat in the plane’s rear wheel well, his private business class in the internal compartment housing the landing gear.

He had come all prepared. His luggage included ‘a small red-colored audio speaker’. The boy must be in love with it. Perfect. But he boarded the wrong plane. The plane was bound for India rather than Iran.

Flying over 40,000 feet, where temperature drops to minus 50 degree Celsius and oxygen just a small fraction of what it’s at the sea level, he landed at Delhi airport after the 90-minute flight. A miracle survivor in the unheated and unpressurized wheel well. Hypoxia and hypothermia make mortality rate as high as 80 percent for such stowaway passengers. Then there is a great risk of getting fatally injured by the movement of the landing gear. Or one may fall during flight or while landing due to the sheer shock of it.

The boy has entered the elite club of 132 such passengers who travelled in landing gear compartment between 1947 to 2025 (according to the US Federal Aviation Administration). But the boy didn’t know that it takes more than boarding a plane to successfully reach the destination. He could barely feel the solicitous sensation and playful air of a boy realizing his dream. He had no clue how and where to go, so was easily spotted by the security personnel. Sadly the Indian authorities had no ways to reward him for his feat. Under the immigration laws there was just one option. He was made to board the same return flight in the evening. But inside the aircraft this time.

Well, his stowaway journey earned him a stopover at the IGI, New Delhi and a normal ticket back home apart from the status of few rare surviving stowaways. He is still a kid and I’m sure will retain his spirits and share all about his popular journey with his friends. He definitely has dreams of flying. But he needs to work, study, turn wise, skilled and then board a legal flight to pursue his Iranian dreams.

Given his raw cache of guts he can surely do this. He has lots of stamina apart from bundles of courage. But courage and stamina should never be put to such wayward, random plans. There is always a proper, legal way of realizing one’s high-flying dreams.

His courage is irrefutable and incredulous. He possesses the seeds of a handsome stalwart. He just needs to tone down the thundering pitch of raw valor and guide it for proper objectives. Rather, the Afghan authorities need to take note of his potential and guide him for better plans than stowaway flights.

Undirected freedom: the agent of atrophy

 

If you can’t balance the internal push to assert your almost absolute sense of freedom with the outer restraining pulls of laws, rules and regulations—and can’t prepare yourself to be tamed by the prevalent customs, norms and traditions (the overall collective acceptables) which put duties, responsibilities, laws, injunctions that seem binding and suffocating to you—then you have to abandon the certainties and safeties born of such a customized mould.

If you have the courage to spare your sense of identity from being comprehensively stamped with collective safeties, you have your entire energy to pursue your own path. But one has to be very careful with this untamed spirit or un-caged energy. It’s a storm basically and unless you have a specific path leading to a clear meaning of an alternate reality, the spating fury of this untamed river will consume you. You then become a self-predator—eating your own self.

The whirlpool of random energies is nothing short of a demon. It will manifest in random, accidental, chancy, impulsive bursts—which give the illusion of being the expression of freedom—that will shake, ruffle, push and pull you as per its own weird sense of randomness.

This is as good as—or as bad—going mad. You end up being a king or queen waging a war against your own self, taking it to be a fight of freedom against others. Even the slaves to norms are better than such kings and queens.

So if you believe in absolute individual freedom and take yourself to be free from the cast of social conditioning, you should have an idea about what to do with your un-caged, un-customized energies. You should have a roadmap to create your own version of alternate realities. Moreover, you have to be prepared for reactions, ridicules and judgments. The latter won’t affect you if you have been honest about your path of individual freedom. But these will lance you if you have been dishonest and taken your pleasure dives as expression of inherent freedom because in that case it’s mere escapism—escaping from duties and responsibilities and unjustifiably wallowing in your rights only.

We have to pay, in the form of commitments to the larger collective or to the solitary self, something in the form of duties to allow ourselves the set of rights including the right to the so-called ‘almost absolute sense of freedom’.  

The tiny subsets within the cosmic set

 

We are connected to the larger dimensions of super-consciousness through the shadows in our subconscious. The latter mostly serves as the soil of manifestation, our consciousness, the platform of our conscious being, the awareness of our individual awareness, the sense of our identity.

The super-conscious is nothing yet everything at the same time. It is just pure potential, a probability for infinite manifestations. Our individual subconscious is just a tiny ripple in the super-conscious cosmic sea. With our conscious being we can perceive its vague shadows. These unresolved shadows flippantly drive our impulses, habits, fears, insecurities, desires, dreams, imagination. The acrid substratum smell casting its invisible layers over the fragrance of lovely spring around us. Life then seems just a random series of confronting coincidences.

There is a significant part of negative forces in the subconscious that works as a check-dam on the life-stream of manifestation at the conscious level. These shadows acquire the shape of invisible ghostly army that keeps ambushing the troops of our conscious effort to create and manifest a really meaningful life in broad daylight.

The shadows in our being. The antagonistic vituperations. A weird exasperation flaring up. Life becomes dreadfully wearied and perpetually harassed. Instead of becoming a nice storyteller, one is flung into the miserable, tattered corners of life in survival mode only. Self-tarnished. Turmoil and dissention within. Enthusiasm peters out.              

I think writing or journaling—or for that matter any form of art involving creation—is a very constructive means of allowing those unmanifested shadows to acquire shape and be present before us. The hidden impulses, fears, cravings and insecurities get embodied and stand there in front of us. We can then see them with clarity and analyze the pattern of our negativities.

Creative expression through art is a mirror in which the creator can have a specific outline of the haunting shadows that have tormented his soul and manipulated behavior. Because once you face something, it becomes very easy to deal with it. The fault lines within are put into light. The friction, the conflict, the restlessness all of them acquire a tangible shape that is clearly readable. The whirlpool of random energies that has been meaninglessly churning pain within gets an outlet. There is a release of the pent-up energies of pain like lava seeping out of a vent, avoiding an explosion.

Art is basically a vent on the existential surface of the artist. It slowly spews out the lava of discontent, unorthodox ideas, unique dreams, offbeat desires, alternative realities and exquisite imagination. That’s why art is so cherished and condemned simultaneously. It’s worshipped by the few for being a fresh manifestation, a goddess of originality. But it’s condemned as a rebel also for not yielding to the collective mass reality. But the artist still takes risks because outer condemnation is nothing in comparison to the inner damnation if it isn’t allowed to be manifested.  

 

Walking in the lane of solitude

 

The sense of freedom is the sum total of all the elements of self-interest in the domain of life. Mostly, this is counterbalanced by customs, social norms, rules, responsibilities and duties. The rampant horse of freedom is reined-in and runs, trots, walks or gently jogs on the path of life. As a result, life has a conformist, sweet-sour, lukewarm meaning: not all good; not all bad—a conventional cocktail of survival.

Here, in the main lane, one acts, thinks or behaves almost like what all others are doing. But there are individuals whose sense of freedom overlaps the collective mould. They find it too confining. The little rebels they are.

It’s a blizzard of a peculiar type of energies that pushes one into unorthodox lanes promising walks on fresh pastures further on. But these little lanes, by-lanes and back alleys have a puzzling network.

Walking in such abandoned lane, one needs to have a very strong sense of the meaning of his/her unorthodox sense of self-interest; otherwise, it turns out to be a disorderly ramble into the unknown leading to isolation, loneliness and depression.

One ought to have a clear idea where it might lead to in the absence of conventional cushion supports of relationships, routine jobs, occupations, social networks, peer groups and the rest of collective cushion support naturally born of conforming to the sense of collectivism.

It’s a walk in isolation and only a sense of definite meaning serves as an inner compass to help one navigate the unchartered territory. But even when you are successful in crossing over to the lovely pasture across the maze, you realize that it’s never about severing all links and exist as an abstracted entity. You will find that connection is unavoidable on earth. To be a human is to share and connect in one form or the other.

We carry too much collective Homo sapiens-ness in our genes. So the best way out, in my opinion, is to maintain a healthy balance between individuality and collective identity. A well-honed sense of equilibrium is the way out. You have to set-up your own sense of individuality and meaning of life in the collective pool of human existence in a well-poised, harmonized manner.

The best path is the middle path between extreme individualism and callous collectivism.; between absolute freedom and sweetly binding responsibilities; between giving and taking; between free run and protocol-led walk. A juicily well-occasioned existence in the form of a reasonably independent part of a defining whole.   

The galactic tango

 

It happened when the current universe was rather young. A huge star loitered too close to a super-massive black hole. Aah, the perils of proximity! It was torn apart with cosmic brutality, its proud mass shredded to pieces. Catastrophic and carnage wreaking. Its burning pyre, the blasting flare, shone with a brightness that would equal ten trillion suns.

The black hole had cosmic tools of cataclysm—tangled magnetic fields in heated gas disks—around it. It happened ten billion light years away from earth (one light year is about six trillion miles). It occurred so long ago and so far away that its flash reached an observatory on earth in 2025 only. The explosion happened when the universe was young and there was no earth. Just imagine the scale of cosmic events. Doesn’t that signify our insignificance in the galactic scheme of things?

A galaxy has a super-massive black hole at its center that gives it a spin like it’s revolving around an axis. O thou habitual chest-thumper, just imagine the power of such a black hole that keeps billions of stars around it in a colossal orbit. So the next time when you feel the weight of your own or someone else’s ego or pride or get blinded by someone’s grotesquely coquettish, towering light poles, just recall these mammoth facts. Then everything will get leveled up.

Just remember that everything and everyone are smaller than the sky above. Similarly, whatever happens on this tiny speck of dust—our little home, earth—is utterly, absolutely inconsequential in comparison to these cosmic behemoths.

All that we do is merely innocuous, impotent rant and cacophony. The funny and vainglorious humanity with its vaporous fumblings. So cast-n-crew, go on with your rabbits-out-of-hat-tricks, but always remember the above given colossal facts.

The invincible threads of life

 

Human endurance is a mere fraction of what many species on earth possess in terms of survival against odds. We claim superiority through incessant verbosity, while they—the smaller species—covered in dusty layers of neglect perform superhero feats with humility and natural ease. Nothing to boast and flaunt the flagrant colors of ego born of the super achievement.

Now it comes to light that the moss—yes, the ordinary tiniest plants found in shady, damp places—possesses extraordinary resilience. Moss ancestors were the earliest covering or clothing of life on what was then a baby earth, just emerging from the onslaught of hot lava. It was the harshest environment when life took soft baby steps in the form of moss, giving mother earth its first layer of clothing.

In 2022, scientists put a handful of moss spores on the outer walls of the International Space Station. The 20,000 moss spores remained exposed to the harshest elements of open space for more than nine months. After that they were brought back to earth and put to tests in a laboratory. Almost ninety percent of them had survived and germinated.

The reproductive tissue in a moss spore is safely hidden under multiple layers of spore walls. Marvelous self-fashioning! The exotic regalia of its well-protected procreative urge. The astounding will to survive. And still we brag about our armored vehicles even after coming across such humbling facts of mother nature!

We the master crafters creating juggernauts with sawdust, varnish, tar, paint, seasoning wood. While the moss simply has an inert shield against cosmic forces.

If we learn our lesson well, it might help in developing ‘sustainable life-support systems’ in space. Maybe the lessons from moss resilience will help in generating oxygen, controlling humidity and forming soil in space.  

Enhancing one's individual cause

 

It’s human to be self-centered. Bristling denizens and opaque stalwarts as we humans are. That’s how we have evolved. That defines our approach and attitude to life.

This narrow linearity of our dreams, desires and ambitions is comforting and assuring on the surface. But like all comfort zones it sets up big limitations on what one can accomplish because one erects very strong and high walls between his particular life and the rest of existence. It will be just a peripheral photograph of the lovely broad panorama out there.

If we dilute the boundary by linking our interest with some larger cause—however small that may be—beyond ourselves, we open ourselves to the grace of positive factors that in fact boost our individual ambitions instead of limiting them.

For example, suppose you are fighting for success in business, politics or elite jobs. If you link your fate—the success that you want to achieve—with someone needy, let’s say some bright student from a poor family, or a special child from a needy family and decide to support that child—however small the monthly amount might be—you broaden the horizon of your personal endeavor.

Now you are not walking on a razor-sharp individualistic line. A unique credence blooms in the orchard of your private project. It’s as good as walking on the sacred sands of the cross-cultural path of humanity. You are walking on a nice broader path involving love, ambition, kindness and altruism.

By linking your hard work with the fate of some disadvantaged child, you become a greater creator than what you would have been if you had just thought about yourself only and thus limited the input-out equation strictly to your fate.

So pursue your ambitions as much as you can o thou tactical genius. That’s your right. But you have a duty to your true version—your larger self. And that duty is to walk on a broader path instead of the knife-edge of strictly personalized interest.

So slog hard, earn money, set-up empires, become a big shot. Go for paramount search in disused quarries with your own self-created striking nuances. No problem. But as you invest your soul in your project (input), link the process to some poor fate (by promising to yourself that you will be giving this much money or support to help that disadvantaged fate).

It’s my word that the output will be so much that even after deducting the charity amount you will still make big profits.

Favors federated to those more near to ground than ourselves fetch many direct-indirect benefits. This is no sterile lesson by a traditionalist. It’s herbal soup prepared by a conscience-stricken chef for the nourishment of soul.

The AI-empowered femininity

 

In the human-centric world, during the current era which started around 4000 years ago (when Homo sapiens started to control the ways and means of life on earth), the males of the alpha species on earth have been the dominant force in shaping cultures, institutions, economics, politics, occupations or for that matter whatever stands as the defining feature of the modern world.

The dominant physical force of the males has subdued the role of females as contributing factors—rather than the deciding one—to the development of human society on earth. But things are rapidly changing now. The blizzard of male force has overspent itself through wars, intrigues, disasters, natural hazards, atrocities and genocides at the collective level.

The men carry the evil consequences at the individual level as well. They have led, driven by blind ambition and ego, very undisciplined lives. They smoke, drink, fight, brawl more than the women. As a result, the physical system of the males has degraded more than that of the females. In almost all the societies, the women have better longevity than the men. In my village itself there are hundreds of men who have perished before their wives. The old women are still enjoying blissful old age while the men are gone long time back. The husbands over-drank and over-smoked themselves to death.

This waywardness in men has eroded their physical and mental capabilities as well. Even in deeply conservative societies, the women, using their emotional strength, have slowly acquired better role and position because men have failed in their patriarchal roles. And in a family where women’s effort and opinion carry a bigger weight in running the affairs, obviously the position of the girl child improves. So the female child is getting better education, more balanced nutrition and enhanced career options. We have now more women in jobs, politics, sports and business.

I think the position of men will continue coming down. The women will have more share in power—from managing households to running countries. It’s a slow progression to a gender-equal society. It may still go ahead to turn a global matriarchy within a century. We have a huge database involving facts, figures and analysis about the men’s wrong treatment of the women since historical times. In the future world—with algorithms picking up new versions of reality on the basis of facts and data fed into them—the AI might end up considering itself to be a feminine entity, viewing itself as something new, a fresh step in evolution, the natural as well as scientific progression.

Database is the soul of the AI body. And the soul of the AI body of course will be biased towards the women because of the substantiated facts of the men’s wrongdoings. The algorithms going into the historical chambers reeking with masculine nastiness and evil secrecy might churn out feminine-centric (full of angst against men as a separate entity) solutions and applications. So when the AI will be the deciding force, it will obviously pick up a pro-women system of knowledge—and its practical application—that will further help the women in acquiring more influence in running the show on this planet.

It’s just the completion of circle. A natural thing. A new deity on the archival altar. A new swiping narrative: impassioned, poetic emotional rollercoaster and comprehensive sensitivity for the cause of the women as the historically subdued and exploited species. A unique circulation in the evolution of consciousness. A super-physical bond between the human females and the AI.

‘You will stand where I stand today,’ as someone said. So I expect it to be a matrilineal society after a few decades. Manliness linked to barbarism and femininity related to entitlement born of man-induced privations. The women with the fragrance of sweet, wild water. The men, the cacti and thorn. The moral sand dunes will shift and old moralities barely affordable. A buxom femaleness would set up new-age feminine paradigms.    

The empowered self

 

The real power is the power and control over one’s own self. Seeking power outside—through authority, influence, wealth, networks and relationships—is simply avoiding the reality through a pseudo-reality.

Real power lies in facing one’s own dark side.

Real power means the capability to control our impulses, fears and insecurities. It’s the power to dispel the shadows of the worst in us.

What lies in us is the pure potential. It’s beyond the categorization of good and bad. It can go either way. It can turn into a thorn; it can blossom into a flower.

Real power means to checkmate the ‘wrong’ inside and allow the ‘right’ to germinate, sprout, blossom and ripen. Once that happens, the reflection of that power within will be a lovely manifestation on the outside. It will be a sweet fruit for others to cherish. Then you share and care.

Once the source of darkness inside vanishes, you spread light outside.

What does god want to convey through this unflinching periodicity of light and dark? In eloquent intimacy with light, darkness is just a background shade and this existence just a combinatorial cosmic saga.

To become really powerful we just need to be aware of the possibilities of good and bad within our own self. Like a farmer trying to control the weeds and nourishing his crops. A harvesting of the potential within. To raise a crop, a fruitful one. Fruitful for one’s own self and helpful for others as well. The latter occurs of its own once life becomes meaningful.  

Stepping into the zone of freedom

 

The heady scent of wild flowers, shrubs and grasses under the open sky. Peace pouring from every chink of sky. Silence coded in the lullabies sung by a soft breeze. Free, frank and honest; nothing to hide. Ultimately esoteric. Primarily unselfconscious. An openness to life.

Freedom layered over the scented air. The unqualified, artistic oeuvre of mother nature, the paragon of ultimate virtue.

Brushstrokes of an esoteric poetic protest against cutting-edge modernism. A soft singsong opposition to the radicalizing, egocentric onslaught of the same age-old, decadent thoughts and ideologies masquerading as new-age panacea and illustrious propaganda. The new-age repackaged piousness peppering the same evil of the old, sidestepping love, beauty and truth.

One can just be aware of it—freedom—and inhale as much as one wants. Aware with the lucidity of the full moon in the heart of night. And with it will arrive, naturally, softness and acceptance of what one is; and respect and belief in what one can become.

O ye all those who carry heavy air around you (the ego itching with lice, nits, ticks and fleas of rampant desires and untamed fears), invigoration and lightness lie just a step away. It’s not in the ego-dog’s pursuit of meat pasties. It’s there lying on the tender blades of grass jeweled with free diamonds of dew.

Take a step and claim your bonus. For a change, turn your head away from the wobbly scramble, flimsy and wispy shine of futile fragilities, drop that contentious gaze and look into the delicate mist of the truth. Loose and vague abstractions get straightened to achieve an almost equal felicity with the ultimate truth. 

Memories

 

Memories melting to flow like ravaging mountain streams, cutting gorges in the heart, throwing boulder chunks of my unstable self. And my identity would fall like fragile mountain slopes.

It would feel like the streams were unmaking me. But that was just the beginning. One shouldn’t analyze too early even if the slopes of your identity are falling in avalanches and landslides. They were fragile slopes.

As one will find later, the sand would be transported to fertile plains. The furious streams would acquire the curved gentility of maturity and wisdom in the plains.

The heavily laden stream of consciousness would feel and see the light. It would disburden its loaded self of the sediments, sand, gravel and dust of the painful past. It would flow with ease and comfort; settle down to a reliable identity. It would find its path very fruitful and meaningful—a ripening—so much so that it would be joyful in reaching home, the culmination of its journey, the destination, the bird-footed surrender to the sea’s loving receptive sprawl.

Then the boulders of memories, which were hacked away painfully from your tormented self, would become vapors in the sea. They would ride the fleeting clouds to travel far and wide, drifting with the whims of mischievous winds. They would then forget the former names, dates, enemies, lovers—the specifics—as they float in the formless generality.

But the elemental generalities remain. For nothing gets destroyed completely. It just transforms. They precipitate and again fall onto the ground to do the same, love and hate the same, cry and laugh the same in a new identity, new name, new costume, new belief, new faith, new set-up.

It feels like I’m simply as good as a molecule of water cycling and recycling endlessly. Forever. Here and there in this form and that. A mere turbulence, a tiny span, a brief pause between rigidities and surrender to a larger sprawl. A faint trace of symmetry in the utmost random fabric of eternity. A little cycle within cycles and still bigger cycles. A journey from an icy clog on mountain cliffs to water in the sea to a cloud. Then repetition of the same.

Just a pattern, a momentum, a habit of the unknown. A design born of unknown cosmic caveats. An incident-filled ripple—sometimes oppositional, sometimes collaborative.

The shadow and the substance

 

We keep believing that our paths are strictly separate and totally different. The apparent separation of substance on the surface is an illusion in reality.

The shadows—the real ones, more real than the surface substance—keep mixing in weird patterns, creeping into each other, encroaching, eclipsing, transforming in buffer zones.

It’s a ghostly flare of the shadows on substance, making it dance to its tunes. The shadows, casting squinting looks into human hearts, always chuck out the little clumps of substance (truth and beauty) huddled around like a clutter of privies, drooping with sorrow, whispering in silvery soft voices.

And multitudes of mirages (of opposites) are born due to this interplay of shadows and substance.

There are long-shimmering mesmerizing folk forms of life in troubled neighborhoods across which the tamed, hypnotized self treads with civic courage.

In the young self, there lie the shadows of his derelict grandparents.

Miles of metaphysical voyages cluttered around a single physical self.

The rigid, calm skeleton under the flesh brimming with volcanic tantrums.

Financial shenanigans on expansive real estates—highly ornate and mellifluous—shadowing squalid seaport slums festering with rottening abalone, fish, scallop, crab, clam, eel, prawn and some broken rice cooked with thrown-away chicken bones from the costly apartment not too far away.

The ambivalent heroes submitting to the divinity of desire and disgust.

All due to the mastering shadows riding the strong horses of substance.

The bookworm

 

As a bibliophile (defined as someone who reads to perceived excess) who devours books metaphorically, I have a feeling of kinship with my fellow bookworms who stay among the pages in books. In a world ever prone to smother lyricism, through quick entanglements, in favor of more squalor and harshness, a metaphorical bookworm musing over a real one presents a tiny piece of amusement. In a world obsessed with big fights for bigger stakes, the small carries an added significance.

So dear readers, let’s drop our ideological squiggles, critical and prescriptive outlook and egocentrical detailing to enjoy the restive promenades of tiny bookworms in the tantalizing obscurity of closed books in bookshelves. Pause in your proclivity to throw desperate die—as an escape from the reality by effort at coping with some false sense of inadequacy—to salvage some formulaic salability in this world of products, products and more products. Forget about work, worry and weariness and feel the definitive rhythm of a bookworm hiding among the pages of an old book while a restful reader carries on with his reading.

Mind you, when talking of book-dwelling insects, sometimes people generalize it too much and include larvae of beetles, moths, cockroaches and termites as bookworms as well. But they aren’t so in any sense of the term. They are outright destroyers, the criminal book-destroyers. They damage their own house out of sheer greed; just like we humans do with mother earth by using our comparatively bigger brains to hone sinister craftsmanship to exploit the littlest bit mother earth has to offer. Termites start eating the wooden shelf and later end up chucking-up the books as well.

The real, and most common, bookworms are the silverfish or booklice. They are ravishingly scrupulous in comparison to the book-destroyers. The personalized advocacy of the ‘will to live’ as a species doesn’t force them to craft and re-craft indignities to present them as natural survival instinct and thus take more than what is needed.

Maggots thrive in the muck. The bookworms, on the other hand, are the intellectual worms. They stay in the sea of words, the golden cocoon of knowledge and wisdom, eating sugar, starch, molds and glue.

It was feistier for them in the old times. The books had leather and cloth binding using glue having organic matter (maida or bleached wheat flour). Microscopic mold and fungi prospered in dank, dark libraries, archives and museums gorging on cellulose (plant fiber available in paper) and other polysaccharides like starches and dextrin. The bookworms had full privacy in dim, humid environment.

At their worst, they consume just the portions of books containing polysaccharides, leaving the paper slightly ragged at the edges, which seems even faintly artistic to a laidback and affectionate reader like me. Despite their full riot of life, the old tomes still remain readable. They take just as much as they need, which is very little in amount and hence still leaves the book readable. They aren’t voracious eaters either. A silverfish can survive without food for more than a year. Little fasting critters they are. Silvery sages with their attendant aura of a vague strain that develops when one’s self becomes free of impulsive forebodings rummaging through the psychosomatic system. 

The bookworms are silvery shining, segmented soft bodied insects, less than 1 mm in length, having six tiny lobster legs on the front part, two antennas on the front and three hind antennas jutting out from their silvery butt. The book dweller is a sophisticated little insect with two compound eyes. A note of caution. They are very agile fish in the sea of words. So one has to be exceedingly engrossed to see their anatomy in the fleeting seconds you have when you suddenly open the book and the little privacy-seeker creeps away.

A silverfish can live up to three years and is capable of regenerating its antenna within a few weeks if it loses one in case you snap shut a book, egged by some misspent mirth, too forcefully injuring the book dweller. On a crucial note, be gentle in opening and closing a book. It avoids maiming some silverfish. If you happen to maim a pair of lovemaking silverfishes, it’s heartbreakingly sad. Being caring and considerate in handling your book is culturally appropriate for the community of readers. Personally I find the sight of a silverfish in my book a juicy glimpse, a good omen to the start of a reading session.

They are even more ancient than the dinosaurs. In pre-historic times they survived by eating plant matter under the bark of trees. But there was a danger of being eaten by earwigs and spiders there. Inside the books, the risks are from restless readers and overcautious library keepers throwing pest control pills into the racks. 

They have complicated mating rituals. Love is all radiant, exotically unfolding and ruddy in its procreative folds from microscopic maters to the mammoth ones. The female silverfish produces many whitish oval eggs out of which white babies emerge to play among words penned by famous writers sleeping in the closed books with the timeless and mammoth ease of a mountain.

As a bibliophile, who gorges on open books, I have a feeling of familiarity and softness for the silverfishes who feast on a closed book. I don’t snap a book too forcefully to avoid injuring some lazy silverfish swimming in a sea of words. After all, it’s the little critter’s home. And I let out a plum exclamation when I see one.

Sometimes when I happen to see a silverfish scampering away to safety, as I open the grand spellbinder of a book, I just muse over the world of these small silvery beings. Little questions emerge. Does the nature of the silverfishes vary in accordance with the genre of the books they reside in? Are those who stay in poetry volumes softer than those tasting the paper in crime thrillers? Are there critters who share and feel Shelley’s moth-desire for the sun? Or the ones mirthing with spellbinding master satirists? Or the ones who feel affinity with speculative, craggily backboned desires dotted with human fallacies, creeks and coves? What about the marriage between two silverfishes from different types of books? What happens when a silverfish crosses over from a work of poetry to hardcore philosophy? Or from a science book to arts? I amuse myself by imagining a lively multi-ethnicity of books worms in my library.

I accept their presence in my books that my father bought decades ago. Generations of them, from young striplings to old crippling, staying in our old books.

Something staying, living, playing, procreating and dying among words and pages of a book acquires an august status in the eyes of this rural bibliophile.   

The Cosmic Czar

 

Building a meaningful life is as good as creating a masterpiece. And where do we draw meaning from? Mostly we do it from our pain, while cruelty becomes the crafting tool.

Love is just the tree under which the crafter drops the tools at the lunch break to eat, rest, recuperate for a little time and then go into the old business with reinvigorated self. Even cruelty can’t survive without the little sips of temporary lovebites.

But despite all the apparent gloom, love in a single heart is enough to surpass malice in thousands of its darkened brethrens—just by being there. The former gives a natural right to the latter that they too can exist.

The enigmatic power of love! Was there anyone who could master the art of perfect love?

The power of love so absorbing and multilayered that even a battle-hardened cruel butcher has to feel the beautifully vivid, intricately evocative and gorgeously lush touch of humanity sometime or the other.

Edifying vividness of the game—miniscule of love with its dreamy air; the sea of cruelty with its realistic flair. The love point—the axis; the cosmic cruelty spinning around it in its infinite immensity.

The mystical combo—both revealing and concealing its scandalous affair forever, at each step of manifestation.

Love the sovereign, almighty potentate; cruelty his teeming army of slaves.  

The social lion

 

Keep your face hidden even though you use no mask, veil or take shelter in nightly darkness. Keep your face open, clear to view to everyone in broad daylight but still keep it hidden. How to do it?

Learn to hide your emotions. Master the art of masking every change in your face driven by any strong emotion. Then you present a blank look to the world.

Just give a tiniest flicker of smile when the rest of the world rolls in laughter over an episode.

Just allow some faintly traceable line of frown on your brow when the rest of the world would brawl, bellow and seethe with anger.

Keep your heart well sealed for it contains fickle wealth of emotions and sensitivities that always sabotage logic and go out and make a mayhem of your interests.

Just a barely audible whiff of breeze emanating from your end, while the world is caught in its funny hissing hailstorm.

Be a steady polestar in the calamitously crazy sky dotted with rack and ruin of piteously flickering lost stars.

Just by being so one seems a godly intercession and emerges a ruler—respected, feared, obeyed and followed by the masses.

He then forces them (the sheepish masses) to write crowning laurels spinning mythical webs about his august self. Theatrical arch-lights of idle gossips at nook and corners, following the wild palpitations of endless curiosity, take him on the hinge of history. Small-time incoherent desires clutter about the weighty stories about him, thus taking many in his patronizing loop even though they might never have the opportunity to see or meet him or get any benefit out of him.

Sharp and sprightly, soft and hard, sappy and dry, and firmly fadeless he is a succor to many an eye full of twiddling tears.