The germs and seeds of animosity

 

There are irreconcilable communal tensions in various societies world over. The bug of communalism has rebranded itself in post-modernist world with shinier, more attractive colors.

An uncle from another state is all praise for the Haryanvi Jats: ‘They wiped out their population to make it all clean in Haryana. But the Hindu farmers in our state weren’t up to the mark in their cleaning act. In fact the Haryanvi farmers had put up a proposal to us, “Your area still has lots of gochani (a wheat and chana mixed crop, a weak variation and not sufficiently productive) left, so we will come to cut the harvest and make it just wheat. The chana has to leave or it gets obliterated. One crop only. Only the wheat crop is beneficial for the farmer’s economic welfare. Mixed crops spoil the taste. You guys just have to provide us food while we reap the harvest and make it a suitable monoculture.” But then this chap Gawahaar Lal butted in and undid their plans. Military was deployed in the area. And lots of gochani was left in our state. We have been bearing its consequences since 1947. But the sage ruler is now doing good to make it feel like one crop in the field. We feel safe. Earlier it was impossible to even set out of the house after the dark. They are too violent and have criminal tendency and hence ruled as mafias and dacoits. But now they are forced to be well-behaved and are minding their own business thus leaving us in peace.’

Humanity is like an ever-boiling soup comprising ingredients proud of their insolubility in the broth of unified goodwill. What follows is brazen zealotry in the name of religion; human flesh and bones strewn around like fish scales and entrails. An infuriated mis-creation throbbing with devilish pulsation. The communal debauchery. Ground squelching with muddied blood.

And what does all this come down to? It writes a few lines (the same stale lines written with bloody ink smelling of hate) in the same chapter (the very same chapter plotted by the blood-mongering parasite of hate) in the very same book (the book written by the ever-tormented souls) of anxiety, fear, phobias and intoxication with power.

Dirty talk in countryside

 

Two young Jat boys wrestling in the idle-fields of brash youthfulness with crude humor and rough words. A reprehensible upbraiding of the opponent, grotesquely shattering all civilized norms and disfiguring all etiquettes and civilities.

A plain disrobing of any sense of civility. Plain rascality, bottom up or down. Well curated ragtag metaphors of the god of idiocy.

The impossibly strictest sense of lewd humor. The youthful spirit brutishly bungling, hell bent upon exterminating each other’s honor.

A linguistic representation of some weirdly carnal wrath through stabbing humor.

But the word humor falls short in conveying the entire meaning of this vulgar jocularity.

Boy 1: ‘You and your clan can’t even tear a single pubic hair from my balls. And if you do, you can’t straighten it.’

Boy 2: ‘We will give such hard slaps to your father that he will become a mad monkey.’

(Now how does poor father enter the mud-slinging duel straight after the lancing attack flaunting the steely strength of pubic hair?)

Boy 1: ‘Only your mother will tell what powers he possesses after he rides her.’

Boy 2: ‘Did he ever ride your own mother?’

Boy 1: ‘Yes he did! That’s why I was born.’

Boy 2: ‘Who says he fathered you? Old Bhola rode your mother and then you were born.’

Boy 1: ‘My grandfather is the real father of your father. Ask your granny, who rode her better, my grandpa or yours.’  

I heard this vitriolic verbal duel as I passed by them. The words slaying and shattering the reputations of both clans to smithereens. The thuggish revelry slinging around and spinning webs of their words’ unforgetability. The red and raw mass of its effect turning me conscience-stricken for the sake of our farming community. There I moved away from the scene dominated by these groundbreakers like a recluse and a valueless part of the community of Jats.   

Well, the fate of the farming community of Haryana seems in dire straits. The linguistic vulgarity giving a clue to some mysterious discomfort with cultural ethos, an inherent streak and slitter of vulgarity and a peculiar disconcertment with civilizing forces.  

The outsider

 

Ashiq Dar is from Kashmir. An operator of heavy machines (Poclaine earthmovers), he works very hard, presently working for a contractor who is into legal sand mining from slightly high sandy plateaus of agricultural land in the plains of Haryana.

Ashiq earns 22000 rupees per month. We have a parcel of land on the elevated agricultural plateau called thali in local parlance. The surrounding farmers have removed many feet of sand to level the fields to make it more productive and arable with irrigation from the field channels. Our land thus stood as a tiny tableland, its margins caving in, the slopes falling.

It came to a point when it was no longer arable. So finally we are forced to remove a few feet of sand to level it up like the surrounding fields. And Dar’s heavy machine is shrieking with force, removing sand.

They work late into nights. ‘Isn’t it too much? The working hours?’ I ask. ‘Just doing my duty. The owner paid us full salary even during the two months of lay-off during the monsoon season,’ he says as a man of conscience. A hardworking man has certain compunctions by default.

Earlier he worked in a company where he operated the machines for 18 hours daily for three years.

This contractor provides food and shelter. He leads a sparse life, almost in isolation and exile. You can imagine the sparseness of his life by the fact that his monthly expenditure is just 2000 rupees including the phone bill.

He was married three years back. I ask him about his marital status. ‘Well, what to say? I’m married and unmarried both,’ he says resignedly. His wife quarreled and forced him to separate from his parents right after marriage. But things took still worse shape even after setting up a separate home and hearth. She left him to stay with her parents. There have been brawls, shoutings, beatings, police reports. Laws have changed in favor of the Muslim women. If he goes for a divorce, he will have to pay maintenance money to her. So the issue is painfully lingering on.

‘She is able to give me 24-hour headache. That’s her full time job. During the time when I’m not operating the machine, more and more updates keep pouring in. They lodged police complaint and got my father arrested. Then it’s about my public image as well. She is still my wife officially and imagine someone telling me that your wife was standing there in the market, talking to this man or woman, doing that,’ he looks in pain.

I understand his frustration, the grating cry of his loneliness. He takes cover behind non-stop work and douses himself with more work to forget the tension at home. I know I have heard only his side of the story. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, either this or that way of centre. But despite that I have a feeling that he is a wronged man. It shows from the way he works non-stop.

I give him sweets as Diwali gift. ‘Happy Diwali!’ he says. ‘Happy Eid in advance to you whenever it comes,’ I say. He is genuinely touched. I can see moisture in his eyes. Honesty has unaffected manners.

A hardworking Kashmiri man working day and night here in the plains in north India, saving every single penny, leading the life of an ascetic almost. Facing scores of domestic problems born of a marriage gone sour.

And then it’s only such people, working hard and innocent of any wrongdoing, who suffer on account of some communal flare-up.

There are scores of such little stories lost in the dust, confusion and oblivion of daily grind of life. The real traitors and betrayers go scot free despite their incendiary motives and vulgar desires.

The cunning paradox

 

In the lonely courtyard of being, where plain paper’s desolation listens for the first breath of meaning.

A purling, gnawing restlessness. A haunting mysteriousness. Insistent. Persistent. Rock solid with its uncompromising illusions.

The love-lotus in the life-lake trembles. Beatific, pampering, unfading. Claiming authentic affiliation with divinity, purity, piousness.

It sways, titillated by the waves of wicked, wild lust, as if desire itself were a dark mantra whispered by time. Seeking divinity in rag dolls. The curly headed cherub, carrying his train of lusty entreaties, striving to put life and excitement in her rag-dolled, impassive self.

From its quivering stem rise fruitless fantasies—visions so fragile they appear next to miraculous, vanishing even as they are born. These futuristic amalgamations of flesh and foresight drift like omens, silently heralding a controversy between instinct and illumination.

Notwithstanding humanely institutional interludes—schools, scriptures, ceremonies—man remains basically a beast, evil’s epitome disguised in scriptural eloquence. Mud and filth slinging from lusty skin hidden under striped jersey and quilted jacket. The pock-marked face hidden under a fleecing, lisping mask. Vapid smell doused under clouds of stabbing absurdity of deodorant and perfumes.

Beneath the polished rituals of virtue, there is a gruesome mushrooming of appetite, ancient and insatiable.

Even the aquiline educationist, hawk-eyed and ascetic, senses the unhealed rift: the goldsmith’s preciously precise way, coaxing perfection from fire and patience, and the ironsmith’s grossly wholesome way with metal, striking truth into shape through sweat and thunder.

Between these two rites, the human spirit is forged—half prayer, half wound—forever oscillating between what it dreams itself to be and what it cannot cease becoming.

Notes in the air

 

An ASI demands money from a man in Delhi. Otherwise I will implicate you in a false case, he threatens the man. The filthy dark side of misuse of official position; the little hatchlings of despotism running their miserly, avaricious show at little nook corners where small-time people get caught in the net of their greed and have to pay to get out to run the show of their pitiable daily life.

The man but carries some counterbalancing courage and secretly lodges a complaint against the corrupt cop. The latter is put under a scanner.

In consequence, a vigilance team keeps watch from hidden quarters while the complainant hands over 15000 rupees (crisp 30 notes of 500 denomination) to the bribe-seeking cop.

As the vigilance team pounces to catch one of their own ilk taking bribes, the corrupt cop, sure of the futile striving of any other sort, hands over the possession of money to the free air. He throws the notes into the air. As if the sky, in throes of cosmic generosity for this little erring kid, would take all blemishes on its blue apron thus absolving him of any wrongdoing.

There the notes fly like little kites. Money in the air. The complicated code of alchemical panacea for the impoverished human soul. It must have been a dreamy sight to so many hungry souls bustling with the undying desire to add more weight to their wallets. The sight of money carries an enormous leverage over our moralities, conscience and ethics. It can brusquely change the course of one’s life, forcibly holding one by the collar. So much so that even a man going to a temple for puja would comfortably run to gather some free bucks in such circumstances as unfold in this episode. The gap between what is preached and what is practiced is pleasantly, mischievously narrow. It’s naturally bridged in such situations.

Dozens of passersby jump to grab the free booty on offer. They give a tough competition to the vigilance cops in collecting the money.

Less importantly, the vigilance team could collect only 10000 rupees, some of it they had to take by force from the looters. More importantly, some people managed to run away with 5000 rupees.

A pious inauguration

 

A young couple goes to buy a Thar Rox from a Delhi showroom. The purchase formalities are completed. All documentation is done. The simmering niceties of the courteous staff. Richly fine smiles of the receptionist. The entire establishment smirking obligingly.

The brand new SUV is displayed on the showroom’s first floor; parked there with its well-defined compactness. Magniloquently. The beckoner of distant dreams on country paths and curved intricacies in the hills.

The proud, excited couple is sitting in the SUV accompanied by an employee from the showroom. The vehicle heralds the exciting prospects of many off-road journeys. Lovingly lolling journeys calling munificently.

But before that they want to complete a ritual, which our honorable defense minister performed in France while buying Rafael jets—a lemon squeezed under the new plane’s tyre. As per our cultural traditions, squeezing a lemon under a new vehicle is considered very auspicious. Our beliefs propel our journeys from bullock carts to fighter jets to space ships.

The excited owner but accidently presses the accelerator too hard. Futuristically over-imaginative maybe. The SUV jerks gruffly and moodily. There goes the SUV on its first journey on the path of excitement. It’s an interesting off-road journey right from the start.

The brand new SUV crashes through the glass panes and lands on the road below. Luckily there are no injuries to the passengers. No passerby injured either. Just a poor man’s bike gets a little damage.

Well, that proves to be a successful crash test at least. The company will take pride in the fact. Free real-life testing it turns out to be.

I hope it doesn’t breed distrust between the partners. The wife might get doubtful about her husband’s capabilities of being a good driver of the SUV of their matrimony. I hope this momentary goof-up isn’t incisive enough to be detrimental to their matrimonial health.  

Maybe time itself was overcautiously overloaded and thus nervously goofed up during those moments.

The twisting dance of life and death

 

A moment in a town’s crematorium. Rows of cremation spaces under an open shed. A couple of pyres still burning; one breathing its last. Time ashen, smoldering, carrying funereal stillness. Grief-soaked, tremulous air hanging low like impenetrable fog.

Some pyres gone cold. The powdered remains of bones still slightly visible among the ashes. The ash ready to collect unshed tears. The air heavy with a deadly finality.

The smoldering wood lets out a crackling sound from one of the burning pyres. It sounds like time’s fabric is cracked with farewells and separations.

A discarded hospital body bag lying nearby. Blood spattered on it. Maybe it was an accident victim. Fleas on the blood; buzzing on the painful shadows of endings and farewells. A very discomfiting sight. Smoke going up, leaving hope and tears behind.

In a nearby unplastered wall, a sadabahar flower high up in the wall, sprouting from a crack among the bricks. Life invincible. A flower on its crown. Beautifully bejeweled. A purple bloom. Resilient. Unwithered. A wildflower in the cracked stone. A silent fleeting witness to the endings and beginnings, renewals rather. A breath-born luminal mortal. A butterfly-light lone flower’s endurance in the pyre-lit domain of death. The insistence of life through the stony cracks in death’s fortress.

And a butterfly on the flower in the garden of death with its ashen rows of mortality. The butterfly stitching color and beauty from the grotesque black and white of grief. A flowery pause in the long sentence of death. A flowery comma.

Fleas on the dead man’s blood; a butterfly on the brave flower’s proud head. Life and death; death and life.

Death: sandily crumbling life. Life: meritorious, meteoric defiance by the will to live.

But life still prevails with its baby-step maneuvers as death goes elephantly lumbering.

Celebration of hits and bruises

 

Pandhurna district in present day Madhya Pradesh. There is a sad love story in the local folklore. A boy from Pandhurna tried to elope with a girl from Sawargaon. The villages were situated on the opposite sides of a river named Jam. To stop the Pandhurna boy from eloping with their girl, thus bringing shame to the entire village, the Sawargaon villagers banded together and rained stones from their side. The villagers from the boy’s side also retaliated and pelted stones from their end.

Nobody knows about the fate of the boy and the girl. They are lost in old chest of the past. All this happened in remote past they say. The tale is old enough that none of the surviving villagers can claim to have seen it happening. The people of every generation have heard it from their elders. 

But the love tale, resulting in a stone-pelting squirmish, gave birth to a ritual—an annual stone-pelting battle to mark the old rivalry, boost honor and strengthen identity, and pamper the collective egos of the villagers facing each other from the river’s opposite banks. And thus comes into being the annual Gotmar fair.

In the morning people gather on their respective sides of the river and around 10 am stony missiles start hurling to break rival heads. One can see dozens of bloodied heads in remembrance of a love story gone wrong.

This year also (on August 23, 2025) about 1000 people were injured on both sides of the river. The administration had deployed hundreds of police personnel to handle the situation. Dozens of doctors, paramedics and ambulances waited to attend the injured. It was a battlefield from the look of it. Injured men would struggle out of the chaos with bloodied heads as the women took them to the waiting ambulances. Festival drums, yells, abuses and ambulance sirens filled the background.

Thousands have been injured and at least 15 persons have died in the last three-four decades since the authorities started keeping records. The administration tried to ban the festival a few times but people won’t let go of the custom. So now the administration deploys police and doctors to manage and control damaged heads and lacerated skins.

The opposing sides pelt stones at each other and run to snatch a flag hoisted on a dead tree in the middle of the river. Drunken revelers make it even more chaotic. In the past, a bullet came instead of a stone and claimed a life. Probably someone used the occasion to settle some personal animosity. Once a young man trying to snatch the flag—thus claiming victory and bring a conclusion to the fair—fell into the river and died.   

Maybe that’s how the muscular metaphors and ever-enduring myths take shape—sometimes brightly buoyant, sometimes perversely proud, sometimes mystically magical.

Gen Z

 

Gen Z, aspirational youngsters aged less than 28, went on rampage in Nepal. Restless youth, no longer comfortable with inherited stagnation in power structures breeding the same problems in the name of solutions.

The digital natives, experts in online activism and itching to resist systemic misuse of authority, went out seeking accountability, questioning power structures. A tsunami: terribly disruptive and revolting against entrenched norms and hierarchies.

The youth face scores of problems popping out of everyday lived realities. The generational frustration spills over and a leader-light, post-ideological, narrative driven movement bursts forth. The hordes of animated and hope-infused youths go on rampage. It’s a cross-class cutting across caste, class and ideologies. It hijacks the system under a strange sense of moral urgency.

The native fuel is there for the fire; but the trigger is managed by the vested interests from outside. As they say, there will be no fire without the local fuel however hard the outsiders try.  

Inspiration instilled perspiration casting a hypnotizing cloud over the non-conformist, transformational generation seeking opportunities and demanding structural change.

Normalcy is illusory now. It’s a randomly creative and chaotic crux. A fuming flux. Millennial strides of the youth clamoring for governance and public good. Silvery magic of civic minded layer over the typical youthful brashness to just fall into mischief and vent out unspent, unguided energies.

An outburst against the preposterous undertakings of the old political order. The moth-eaten democracies trying to drag the deprived masses into the seductive quagmire of mediocre (that too illusionary) triumphs.

I know there are deeper conspiracies apart from what they say—the young people boiling with anger over the ban on social media applications.

Earlier it happened in Bangladesh. The discontent fuelled by the cocktail of economy, polity and religion.

It happened in Sri Lanka. Gubernatorial hype of Rajpakshe clan with their imposing lies about nationalism that was smartly sold out to China.

It keeps happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan now and then in slightly varying colors. In Pakistan, there is a persistent attack on democracy. The exceedingly titillating cocktail of theology and military always brewing nefarious broth to throw it like acid-attack on the beauty and growth of India. No wonder, the institution of democracy there has been spiritlessly mediocre.

There is a ring of fire around India—the fire of discontentment and disenchantment with politicians. It affects the entire political sphere in the subcontinent. Normal procedural slip-ups (stage-managed) prove disastrous in the long term.

In my humble opinion, the Indian politicians should now be careful. They can’t take things for granted. The ring of fire around us can creep in with mischievous pampering by big powers on either side of the block.

Only sound democratic norms in practice, and not just hypothetical lip service to the constitution, can save the fire from creeping in. Only the coolant of constitutional norms in honest practice will douse the fire.

We have to stay vigilant because the idea of fire and arson is contagious in these social media driven times.

On the solitary trail

 

The green, shimmering, sashaying gown of mother earth fluttering to monsoon winds on my solitary trail. The rain-lulled path is indeed a solitary trail now. The thin ribbon of solace and verdant solitude is clad in grasses, bushes and reeds like a shy countryside lass.

A lovely musty solitary feel to the fern-shadowed trail. An emerald hush layered over it. You just inhale musty silence and sweating peace here. And each slow step on this wild-woven passage counting as meditation.

I quietly embrace this solitudinal offer from the moss-breathing earth and walk in acceptance and full humility, paying homage to these moments. Mother nature’s green-drowned footsteps on the monsoon-softened ground echoing in the form of an overgrown silence.

August rains have been far more in intensity and volume than the normal mark for the month. The solitary trail is overgrown with grasses, reeds, weeds and shrubs. One has to walk very cautiously at each step on the rain-scripted earth to avoid naughty snakes slithering in the grass-swallowed track.

It indeed is a solitary trail, almost untrodden green—with one exception, a sole presence (apart from me) in this calmly breathing wilderness and leaf-slick solitude. A lone man softly moving through this jungle-leaning corridor. A pilgrim of his own kind on the thicketed way. A little interjection in the otherwise undisturbed rain-held remoteness on this verdure-bound way.

He is rubbing hemp leaves on his palms to collect the black soot that will turn to weed for filling his beedis. Mother nature has been kind to him. There are long rows of wild hemp plants on both sides of the mist-clasped trail. He will collect a few beedis worth of weed on his palms.

The man isn’t in disharmony with the living quietude of the path. He is a silent, peaceful man, gently working on the leaves. His lean figure emanating laid-back and easygoing air. His persona almost earth-attuned. He is not overcautious like most of the so-called teetotalers who don’t touch meat, wine, drugs and weeds. But they carry their own nasha of power, influence, wealth and politicking. This silent man appears to be carrying an unruffled soul. With an affably detached self, he readily agrees to get videoed and photographed, just making a little request to not put it on ‘net-pet’ as he puts it.

Weed inhalers are generally mellow-hearted laidback people, not harming mother earth with overblown worldly aspirations like the most of us do. Yes, they harm their own interests and that of their families. But they aren’t over-spirited participants in the chaos that is being splashed around by the so-called sensible gentry.

The man is very soft-spoken and grounded in simplicity. He seems to be quietly amused by my silly eagerness to take his pictures and make his video while he peacefully goes rubbing the hemp leaves on his palms.  

I don’t support and encourage weed smoking. But these people are cool and contended in their own laid-back ways. Mother earth is burdened with over-doers, so such paused personalities can be digested to a little extent provided they keep it balanced with their duties to themselves and their families.

It would be an icing on the cake if they decide not to get married because marriage is a big responsibility and if you get yoked into the matrimonial cart, you ought to fulfill all responsibilities full time instead of getting into a relaxed trance through substances like weed. Marriage plus weed smoking don’t go together. Marriage means full-spirited action to be a committed provider for one’s family. Weed smoking means walking in a by-lane where those who shirk responsibilities try to escape to a different dimension of life which is not compatible with the ways and means of the normal society.

I leave him collecting the fragments of his peace and move on. Mother earth has more tales to tell through visuals, sights, smells and happenings on the path.

Sarus cranes are a symbol of lifelong fidelity, a winged constancy in their sacred companionship. In a world where real love is getting pushed into the corner each passing second, the sight of the enduring union and devoted pairing of a crane couple in lush green is nothing short of an auspicious sign. It’s a shy, grace-bound couple not too eager for the public display of their rituals of togetherness and mateship. They just kept walking, like they fly through their life with monogamous grace, and don’t allow the human-bird gap to be decreased by my curious steps. They don’t fly away at least and that’s their gift to this walker on the solitary trail. They give me enough sight of the quite foreverness and the unbroken duet of their life-song by just walking through the greenery.

There is this friendly drongo. She isn’t camera shy and allows photo shoot from close quarters. Definitely a confident, good-looking girl of the drongo world.

I approach a sad looking puddle of water on the way. This is what remains of the last natural wetland in the countryside around my village. Earlier it was a vast swamp covering many acres that would attract thousands of ducks and other migratory birds during the monsoon and winters. Now it’s just a tiny puddle with a few moorhens, ducks and a couple of kingfishers peeking into its sad waters from the wires nearby.

As I walk further on and reach a lonely hut, it further saddens me. The hut seems abandoned and is already slightly out of order. Kaka maharaj left his hut. He got angry about something and left this hut for a new place. This hut hosted him for more than two decades on his path of spirituality in the countryside. The tiny hut is now getting mixed with nature as grasses and shrubs grow with full freedom around it.

The hut is now packed with a different kind of action, a worldly one instead of the spiritual sojourn. The overhanging branches of a tree canopying the hut are now teeming with the handiwork of weaverbird boys to invite birdie girls to have a look and if they like it accept the suitor and settle for domestic life for the season. Some romeos have put great effort in elongating the grassy foyer to a great length. It’s always a fight for the most beautiful girl through most impressive means of wooing.

The mountains come to my solitary trail in the form of river sands. The Himalayan slopes are washed away by the rain-fed angry rivers and the mountain’s fragmented self arrives here in the form of canal sand. You can feel the essence of Himalayas in this sand. Take a fistful and smell. Yes, it’s that typical Himalayan smell.

My dear friend, the silk cotton tree, is happy at last. Couple of years back the sand mafia had scraped too much earth from around its trunk cutting even the main lateral roots. It turned sad and stood with its pale leaves. No fresh shoot, no flowers for two years. No smiles. Now the monsoon has been more than normal this season. The tree wears a new green suit like a handsome man freshly in love. So happy to see and meet him. I shake hands with him. I’m sure he will smile this season with his luscious red flowers.  

The auspicious art of acceptance

 

I give a big bear hug to all that is, was or will be—a holistic acceptance. The gentle courage of approving all dimensions of my existence—past, present and future.

Carrying an emotional hospitality; enjoying life in the pulsing pause between memories and desires. Because that’s how my body and mind’s biological apparatus—brain—operates to give me a concoction of emotions from the saddest to the happiest.

I take little sips of mammoth wholeness by being in touch with existential totality without the erasure of what happened to me in the past, what constitutes me now and what will become of me in future.

A graceful allowance for vulnerabilities, flaws and fragilities because that’s the scaffolding for strength, power and success. The making of most of my time—by holding it without any grievance, through unresisted presence, by a gentle witnessing of the self. And in the process, making peace with my own becoming. Accepting the dignity of what has happened to me in the past; carrying soft consent to impermanence in the present; holding my dreams for future alive, vibrant and fresh.  

I’m in acceptance of this leela that pulls the individual cart of my existence. I won’t judge my past or future at the cost of the present. A silent reconciliation with time and embracing the unfinished. That’s what pulls my creativity, my urge to be, become something more, something extra, something unique. To be a creator—a radical as well as gentle assent to being.

I carry the steak of this marvelous expansion of mother existence from my end. I just give a huge bear hug to all that was, is and will be on my path. That defines my life. That gives one more little line of cosmic expansion from my end.

Let’s celebrate our body and one of its states of being—mind. Let’s accept the body’s ways of survival through reflections about the past, present and future. Why belittle one at the cost of the other?

This is a lovely leela. Colorful. And it happens because there is this beautiful quality of the human brain to enable our body to be shoved in multiple dimensions. That gives poetry, art, science, and all that we witness around us. It is the driver of all this thoroughfare. Enjoy it. Let all this happen. In total acceptance is liberation from all this, not in negation.

That’s how I enjoy the sweet tension of being in the present moment as an admirer of life, letting it arrive as it is; stable with a feeling of being at home in all this apparent flux.

The pilgrim paying homage to the past, reverent attention to the present and graceful allowance and compassionate continuity for the future.

A rainy day in the village

 

A rain-soaked night in July. The rainy month weeps through clouds. Continuous drizzle in the dark. The night brooding, muddy, hushed and pensive.

The next day gloomy. Sodden. Greywashed. Rainy. A mournful sight like a stillborn child. All wet. But still earth-scented. And that’s the saving grace, if there is any.

Electricity is costlier now in the village thanks to the increased rates and strange new electricity meters, which run at high speed even with just bulbs on. That unsettles the fragile nerves in the village society. As people seek ways to steal power, there are many who play straight through renewable energy.

Lots of houses have installed rooftop solar systems. The rooftop solar panels are nice slanting sliders for the monkeys during fine weather. They hide under them to escape heat, rain and cold.

On this drizzle-soaked day, the trees dripping with water, the monkeys bear a somber expression, a wistful look in their restless eyes, their sense of mischief bruised and held in extraordinary quietude.

When the monkeys are at play on a fine day, the solar panels serve as nice sliders for simian antics. Furthermore, the top-ends are great perch points to put their red bums on and covetously eye some monkey boy or girl. Now, in the drizzle-soaked silence, they seem to be looking forward to typical after-rain simian hustle bustle.

The solar systems’ wiring offers nice biting practice to sharpen their fangs to flaunt them with more sadistic glint during feigned attacks on humans.

On this rainy day, some of them are sitting well behaved under the solar panels. Waiting for the rain to stop and then come out and wreak havoc in the garden below—eating a few guavas and breaking dozens of branches and boughs just for the sheer fun of it.

And a sad sight. A big black butterfly with red spots has fallen on the ground. Upturned. Wings stuck to the wet ground. I think it’s dead but it flutters in protest as I try to pick it up. I hold it softly on a yellow guava leaf and leave it on a rose. It clings sideways, not able to maintain balance. A dying butterfly most probably.

The rain continues to fall and so does the butterfly. A very sad sight: a butterfly stilled. Dead. A young monkey defies the rough weather and jumps onto the electricity cables and walks like an acrobat. Mischief hanging above; sorrow settling below. The time fractured by monkeyish mischief and loss of a butterfly. A boy laughs looking at the monkey. The rain blurring laughter and sorrow.

A little story the rain writes on mud. My little nephew looks at the dead butterfly—silence learnt innocently; a child learning grief while looking at fallen wings. The boy maybe thinks that possibly the butterfly forgot to fly. The rain doesn’t know it’s a sad day in a little corner in the small garden of a village poet.

A feral cat gets bored with its hiding in a barn and runs out to get into some action. The play proceeds; the once winged life gone. The little boy tenderly lifts the winged corpse on a leaf. Learning love, care and empathy.  

The perennial plight for a home

 

I bought a flowerpot. So it becomes my pot. Earlier it was the flower nursery owner’s pot who had bought it from the pot maker, who in turn got soil and other ingredients from various places and players. Ultimately it had come from an absolutely sovereign, free source—nature. Finally it becomes my pot. Or does it? Wait, there is no end to the chain of claimants.

I planted holy basil plants in it. My sense of ownership getting denser because of my faith in Tulsi Mata. That takes the idea of ownership into the dimensions of holiness, faith, worship and rituals.

But then the chain of ownership doesn’t end with me. Now it becomes an ant colony’s pot also. They have been working on elaborate subsurface tunnels to adjust their bourgeoning population.

The ants have worked so hard on it that they have earned a right to consider it their pot from the same logic that I use for my ownership. In fact it’s their city, town or village itself.

The colony has prospered within months. I know it’s not good for my holy plants. When I water the pot I almost feel like deluging the ant colony, to scare them away, to force them to change their mind and see it as an unfavorable location and move to some other place.

But it’s a very stubborn ant colony. They are fighting it out. They will stay in contention as long as I keep the war within conventional limits like digging and watering and avoid the unconventional, unethical means of perpetrating slaughter and genocide using some insecticide.

It would be a sin. Committing a sin to continue with my pious worship of holy basil would be too contradictory. Moreover, the poet in me can hardly take such a drastic step.

I have raised my war-faring tempo to a big extent but always keeping it well short of unethical means. I count upon water as the main agent of my attack. My strategic planning behind this maneuver being that the ant commanders will finally realize the futility of staying in bogs.

But they turn out to be more innovative and practical than I imagined. They have drilled exit channels from top to bottom. The more water I pour, the more it comes out of the excess water exit hole at the bottom of the vase. They have smartly connected all the floodwater tunnels to the sole exit point at the bottom. Water gushes out within seconds of being poured on top. Smart ants!

They know they cannot do much against me, save some bite or two now and then. However, they can handle water, not by fighting it but by using its quality of flowing through suitable channels.

All I can do is simply watch with marveling helplessness.

Multiple shades of a mundane day

 

From the mirror of the past: a long-forgotten entry from an old journal.

September 21, 2007. World Peace Day. Maybe. For I am not sure of it. Even if it is, it’s just like any other mythical, unattainable thing, like the unreachable calls from the traditional past because there seems to be no real peace. Though they try to impose this mass illusion, this concept of peace. It’s not even a tattered veil to obstruct the rays of pinching reality from reaching us. It’s a make-believe, see-through medium through which we hoodwink at the aggressive eccentricities glaring down from the ebullient, hotter, fiercer, unclean face of the modern sun.

The new slogan ‘Chak De India’ is infusing fresh energy into Indian sport’s hitherto lethargic body. But now floods of adrenaline seem to be pumped through the sluggish veins injected with the big doses of catalyst brewed in the pumped-up hysteria of the triumphanism-hungry masses of a resurgent India who want to forget the past inefficiencies and present’s injustices to jump into—pell-mell stampede—the bandwagon of progress and materialism. They grab at every sinew to float their puny dreams to majestic distances in the choppy seas. Even if it means butchering, pruning, cutting, slaying, trimming the mammoth, majestically uncertain, saggily bearded tree of the once ‘gentlemen’s game’.

After all, modern dreams, passions and nostalgic hoopla are best carried piggyback on the fiery lean-mean, unsparing back of a utilitarian, fast, unclassy rocket. Twenty 20 is just such a machine, capable of carrying the hyper-sensitively frothing, bubbling dreams to higher and higher orbits. Cricket in its traditional form is too senile and classy to offer its back with limited, specified, specialized seat capacity to carry the mass, modernist passion. So the horde is humping down enmass to the faster trolley.

Last night we defeated South Africa to enter the T20 World Cup semifinals creating a mid-night hoopla all around the country. All the fears, inhibitions, pricked conscience born of inefficiencies firmly rooted in every nook corner of our beloved country were unbridled and the traditional elephant roared with the throat of a lion and galloped with the agility of a horse. It had galloped still higher when on the night before the last one Yuvraj Singh hit six sixes in one over of young Mr. Broad from England. An overarching swipe of jubilation across the length and breadth of this big country; burying the overstrained creaking, nervous, painful voices of its floorboards and wheels; turning the masses oblivious of the systematic perforation into its sheets, of tiny noises, of puny mutinies.

So on this day (September 21) when India celebrates the ecstatic lynchings of mass excitement among the cocaine-snorted, lion-hearted rabbits enjoying the mirthful bat-ball slaying in the unsparing, brittle, brisk, crisp version of the once gentlemen’s game, one little tragedy (on the scale of the nation) has fallen, crashing on my tiny being with its mammoth force. Cousin brother Andy alias Pintu alias Pardeep completed his journey on this eventful, fateful, excellent, majestic, tragic day.

The tragedy took place between eleven and twelve in broad daylight on the railway track at our local town. The place where there used to be the railway crossing for the district road, which but now speedily flies over the railway tracks carried by the massive concrete blocks and pillars of a new flyover.

Here poor Andy met his unknown, silent end while frenzied media blared the songs of sporty excellence. The tyres on the flyovers sped with burning hot rubber. The long metal snakes, the centipedes of common pride and individual pains hurtled over the merciless, straight, aloof, lifeless, cold, hot, hard, steely tracks. All these busy in making it another day.

Cousin brother Pintu, somehow, deliberately as well involuntarily (what else is alcohol addiction?) came between (like a comma unwanted in the metallic sentence’s rod rigidity) metallic speed and ever-receding destinations. And it swiped him over in one stroke. Just brushed him away.

His left foot mutilated, the symbol of cold, hot, hard grip by one of the rolling feet of the centipede of death and destination; his head smashed on the planks, rails, rail boards of concrete, wood and metal; his roundish bearded face lined with blood from the ears, mouth and nostrils.

By the time the rail workers took his body to the civil hospital, all the hoopla of the world peace day, sports victories, flyovers, railway tracks had ceased to exist for Cousin Pintu. And there his body lay in the emotionally immune, stony, unclean, depilated hospital mortuary. In an abandoned corner—overgrown with bushes and weeds—of the hospital premises. On the lifeless, mute, post-mortem concrete block.

The small frame of the thick set, heavily bespectacled doctor emerged after performing the task. Stone dead tiled walls stared at cousin brother’s peacefully, tragically laid out body on the post-mortem block. The last stage of hospital formalities for the corpse before packing it in the white body bag. And we the little punctuation-mark brothers of our swiped-away comma brother lined, wept, mustered up courage to roll him into white sheets to carry him home for cremation.

People say that he over-drank himself to death. But given the honesty of his conscience I would always spare him this flaw, chronic drinking. Even though he would have been a very successful householder without it, instead of leaving this world as a 35-year-old bachelor, weak of health and with a bit strayed mental balance during his last fortnight on earth.

Whom should I blame? His madness in love for a girl belonging to a different caste whom he wasn’t permitted to marry and which basically caused his fall into alcoholism? Or the unsparing, caste-based society? Or his family’s inability to adjust his offbeat love chemistry in a society cast in rigid, conservative mould?

If I try to answer, so many ghosts from the past will come alive, a whole lot, with their pointy cause-laden fingers into the troubled, stifled relations in our family. I will talk of it sometime later. Presently, the death of a nice childhood playmate stares in its chilly abstractness.  

Childhood memories arrive like sunrays cutting across a curtain of fog—some carry sharp stakes of pain, some beckon with a pearly hiatus, some like bland soup, some like fidgety foragers, some heart rending, some making a passing reference.

Only the air is left, the air of memories, of what was once cousin Andy.