अहंकार का डीमक

 रावण बलशाली, पराक्रमी, ज्ञानी, तपस्वी, देशभक्त सब कुछ था। अपने अथक प्रयास से लंका को सोने की भी बना दिया था। लेकिन फिर उसे अहंकार का दीमक लग गया। दीमक का तो काम ही व्यक्ति या वस्तु को खोखला करने का होता है। इसलिए रावण ने इतना कुछ जो बरसों में बनाया था वो सब कुछ महीनों में बरबाद हो गया। अहंकार एक बहुत विशालकाय बांध में छोटी सी दरार की तरह होता है, दिखता नहीं है क्योंकि स्वयं वह व्यक्ति तथा दूसरे तो उस बड़े भव्य बांध की भव्यता में खोए रहते हैं। लेकिन वो छोटी सी दरार कुछ समय के बाद विनाश का कारण बन जाती है। प्रकृति और अहंकार का छातीस का आंकड़ा है। प्रकृति अहंकार को नहीं छोड़ती, यही सतत् नियम है।

The cult of hate

 Political extremists (both left and right) and religious fundamentalists try to change the masses for the worse. Cut down the people to a fraction of their potential and you have nice governable puny-heads. They serve meow meow. For instant gratification. Hate, phobias, pseudo-greatness, anger and jealousy are very convenient tools to rob someone of sanity and get cast as a hallucinated pawn in the power game. Those who are power hungry—individuals, groups and institutions—try to disempower those to be under the influence of their power. It cannot be otherwise. The power pyramid has few strong at the apex and weak masses at the base. It can never be a square, having people of same realized potential from top to the bottom. Those ambitious for power can never think of empowering the masses. In that case the pyramid loses its standing. With pseudoism and populist rhetoric they rob the masses of the balance of their judgment. Hate does it. It tilts you off the balance. You fall prey to weakness. You become lesser of a human being. The power monger’s ambition draws on the peoples’ weakness of judgment. They try their best to keep the people to be nearsighted. To tame them in a sphere, with unrealized potential, from where the launch-pad of wisdom is too far. It draws votes for the power hungry, in a day to day life but it is paid in terms of racial attacks in America, brutal killings by Islamic extremists, attacks on Africans in India, and scores of incidences when people pick up hate and run after each other.

Beautiful spring and smiles

 

All pains and suffering lose their meaning in the face of such smiles. Wake up to a beautiful spring morning. The worst of frosty nights are over. The sun shines warmly. The air is fresh. The skies bathed in repainted blue. The trees assertive through new saplings. The birds ecstatic. And with a kissable smile, Mother Nature sends her assurance through a belated spring. The message of love, life, living and compassion. Listen to it. Read it written all over. Her child is sick. She has redecorated the garden with utmost care. So when the child comes out of the sick bed, there will be plenty of fun and frolics. She just just put her child to bed for rest and recuperation. Most importantly, she has given the little picture of alphabets for the child to revise and recollect the basics of existence, the simplest things which the child has forgotten as it made its postdocs thesis too complex. Time to shed the burden. High time to smile more. Acquire the natural cosmetics of health and glow with peace of mind. To hug the trees. Kiss the flowers. Listen to the singing rivulets. To lie on grass and stare at the vast canvas of the sky. To breathe in life and let go of anger, hate and jealousy. To shed animosity. To love animals. To allow Mother Nature to stay undisturbed in pristine forests. To maintain the sanctity of the seas. To distribute dignity to the masses instead of amassing wealth in select pockets. To make this little home earth a paradise instead of seeking heaven in the cosmos. To liberate faith from the clutches of dogma. To replace paranoid competition by balmy cooperation. To rest, repose for creative imagination. To walk joyfully instead of huffing and puffing to another same boring destination. To be joyful and help others be the same. To complete the journey so joyfully and fully that the culmination loses its pain. To reach the destination full of grace, dignity and with a smile. To say goodbye not with a painful sigh, but with smiling tears of feeling blessed!

The real cause of suffering

 Most of us are tired and bored of being our own self. The 'self' seems almost a prison and we are always rushing out to beat our self loath and boredom by connecting with people who we assume match our personality cast. These people to whom we rush to beat our boredom are but our opposites because who would go and enter the same prison one is trying to get out. So when the connection and relationships also don't dilute the feeling of self loath, we put the blame again on outside forces, people and circumstances. No relationship will work till we are bored being ourselves. The problem is always inside, our ego but would always try to dupe us by putting it on the people and life circumstances. To be a friend to anyone outside, one has to share a beautiful bonhomie with one's own self. You have to smile within to laugh genuinely with others. You have to be comfortable with your own being first. Only then others will feel relaxed with you. The inner turmoil, restlessness and stress of just being the way you are takes a big toll on what we make of our life outside. The way we feel, think or act is the cause, not effect, of all the shit we find outside in our life. The cause lies within. The externalities are mere effects. And solutions start with causes not effects. So if the game of life isn't nice outside, accept it as an effect of something wrong within. To be a smiling friend to others, first learn to be friendly with your own self.

House Vs Home

 There is a house well plastered, tiled and painted on the outside walls. Its well designed and vibrant exterior catches attention. Drawn by the catchy exterior you step inside. You expect an equal attraction inside. But a surprise awaits you. You come across soot, grime, dust, unplastered walls, cobwebs, cement and stone crush staring at you. It’s a house that has been left unattended inside. Incomplete. You will feel running out. It’s a house that needs the workers rather more than the visitors. That’s how most of us die: just houses under construction. Throughout our lives we keep on painting the outer walls to satisfy our ego through expanding our visibility, hoping attention will give happiness and peace. Little do we realize that real comfort lies in the house completed from inside. So the interior remains incomplete, disordered. Can such a house give permanent peace? No. Outer walls are important. But only to the extent of defining our world, a psychological boundary to stamp our ownership of our chunk in this world. Only this much. And the importance of the outer walls is meaningless if the interior is unfinished. Outer paint is just the title of the orderliness inside. A summary of all the cozy arrangement inside. We, but, commit the folly of treating the title as the main story. Can a title replace the main text of the story? No. The title ought to be catchy. But the story is all that matters.

You are the creator

 All this is a little funny innocent thoroughfare around. This creation is just pushing a unique expression through our identity, our point of existence in Her infinite folds. So let's be proud of what we are doing. Our karma is nothing but a contribution from our end to help the eternal truth in maintaining its sanctity, its mystical depth. So let's create well in full honesty to our own self. Spool your webs and feel that we are fulfilling a vital part in Her scheme of things. Each step we take is in fact Her step to realise Her full potential. We are merely an expression of the infinite potential lying at the quantum level to take more and more shapes and expressions. So do your karma in action, thoughts and emotions in full sincerity, with full awareness, with full presence. And you make Her happy, happy about Herself because She is you and you are just a drop in Her vast cosmic sea. She is happy when you are happy. She is sad when you are sad. She feels like a majestic creator when you are creating something in full awareness and consciously. And She is right there in you when you are aware of your full presence.

The real cause of pain

 Only those in suffering and pain themselves become the source of sorrow to others. The fire within has to burn the carrier's inside first before spreading its effect on others. Happy people hardly cause sorrow around. Observe the firy pit inside, the primary cause of one's sorrows. If we become aware of its burn, we will stop blaming others for our miseries. Others are merely triggers for the fire to flare up more viciously at the most. It helps to remember that all our so called miseries of life are primarily born of our inner condition rather than the life circumstances and the people around.

Hope

 Here is another story of Hope.

In the Himalayan villages there are some reports of some village elders willing to go into the forests so that they become prey to the tigers. These are very poor people. A tiger victim's family gets one million rupees in compensation. But is it only about money? No. It's about keeping the HOPE alive in their families even if they are no more. So dear friends, just imagine people are ready to even sacrifice their lives to keep the hope alive in their families. Hence, all the rest that one can do to keep the hope alive should be a mere cakewalk.

A little story of Hope

 Sharing the little story of a farmer in the locality.

A poor almost illiterate farmer with a little patch of land. A nice man but into alcohol. His son a very diligent disciplined hardworking boy. He did tapasya for medical studies in India. Sadly couldn't get admission. His father sold his little land and sent him to Russia for medical studies. The boy is excelling in studies there. The father is slowly dying and fading away but he is peaceful for keeping the HOPE alive in his son's life. There is a smile on his face even in the face of death.

That's what life is. If we are lucky we get people who help us in keeping our hopes alive. But even if we are all alone, we have our own SELF to keep the HOPE alive.

Healing your life!

 Good morning everyone...wake up to a lovely day of Karma, learning and smiles.

Sharing the story of Dr Joe Dispenza.

I always wondered how come this medicine man turns out to be such a mystic! And here is the cause.

He met an accident at the age of 23, breaking six vertebrae in the spine. Paralyzed. The doctors said the only chance at walking would come after inserting two 12 inch long steel rods along the spine. He said no and asked to be discharged from the hospital. For three months he lay on his stomach at his friend's place and reconstructed his spine using creative visualisation...step by step...with extreme focus, intention, awareness, being present in the body...and made a new reality using his mind power, by being open to the infinite mind that has all the solutions to all problems. He got up after three months and simply walked away to glory. He hasn't had back pain in the last three decades. He says it's not just about the body, we can heal our life in the same way by recreating better careers, relationships, everything.

Hope you like it. Wish you all a happy refabrication of life!🌷💛

Healing Hugs!

The mystery of nothingness

 The matter-like behaviour is a property of the cosmic mind, the universal intelligence throbbing as the energy. Mind, universal collective consciousness, is the primary cosmic constituent. The so-called matter is merely a manifestation of it, just a dependent property. Had it been the reverse, i.e., mind-type behaviour of matter, we surely would require the basic, unbreakable building blocks having intrinsic properties in terms of atomic and subatomic particles. But as we see it, subatomic particles have no intrinsic value and properties independent of the observer. With matter first, and mind just its behaviour, eternity would be mathematically impossible. However, a fundamental entity in the form of cosmic mind leaves an open ended, ever evolving field for the manifestation of matter in countless ways over eternal paths of creation. Simply because there is no intrinsic property or value to define and limit the material manifestation. Call it the cosmic energy or the cosmic mind. It's a dimensionless plane where any kind of material dimension is possible to draw out of nothingness. The limitless canvas. Wipe it, draw another. On and on. Is there any limit to imagination? No. Same is the case with cosmic mind's imagination. Eternal are its horizons.

The pointless point

 To look for ultimate truth, or reality, or absolute knowledge, the body would need immense amount of energy. Because the normal levels of energy would be sufficient to sustain the normal, collective perception that conditions our mind to settle for base-level actualization of the infinite potential.

It’s mankind’s destiny to go for truth, now or later, in this journey or the ones to come. It’s a natural evolutionary flow, it cannot be avoided. In an unawakened state this energy will go randomly, in dissipative ways, creating sweet-sour mischief, this worldliness. But it’s merely a matter of time—the time spanning various lifetimes—before it stabilizes, develops patterns of self-discipline to touch a peak in that very individual consciousness. It enables the carrier body to look for what lies beyond the simple perception-based reality. And the still remaining stumbling blocks in body, mind and emotions have to fall along; otherwise one learns the things in a tough task-masterly way.

This heightened energy finds different expressions like bhakti (devotion). Gyan (knowledge), karma (action), art and still much more that we don’t have a clue as of now.

The evolution in consciousness will never hit a dead end. It’s a cosmic soup of infinite potential. What you think, feel, imagine or act sets a new point of reality. And it goes on at every point of existence.

Faith-based expression of heightened energies is a very sublime form of expression. This dimension unfolds in the corridors of bhaav. It’s very near the soul, this channel. It’s warmly loving and draws warmth from the soul itself, the high point of joyous realization in the individual consciousness. It’s so easy to jump into the river of ‘relative bliss’ from this point because it’s very near to the source profound bliss. But before that faith has to shine bright in its purity and there will be tests through situations and circumstances, just like there will be in other paths.

In its karma expression, this energetic blizzard will sire a karma yogi in the carrier body. The carrier body will express its energetic storms in setting up disciplined, righteous energetic patterns (dharma) in the society around, like Rama and Krishna did.

In its gyan expression, the individual consciousness in its carrier body will try to know more and more, observe keenly, understand, draw logical conclusion in an effort to make a meaning of this mystery and chaos. It’s an effort to cut the mind with its own tools, using the basic faculties of the mind to undo its own framework. To allow mind to run as much as possible in its pursuit of knowledge, so that finally it stands helplessly, falls and sees a better expression across the cobwebs of its constructs.

There is another dimension of the expression of this energetic storm, a replica of the massive stars bursting somewhere in the cosmos. It’s kindalini awakening. It’s the most tangible of all the expressions. It’s a raw, naked force. It stands in front of you, holding you in its grip with a direct maneuver. It doesn’t take any diplomatic cover. It stares in your face. It shakes you. It’s nearest to the gross body in its expression. It’s so near to the base level of ego identification that you clearly feel its storm in the body as it breaks the obstructions in its path. I would say it’s a mixture of all the three above mentioned expressions. You are jolted off your safe zone at all levels of your existence. To make a meaning of all these psychic reshaping, the reformulation of the nervous system, the remodeling of the perception channel—which is usually tough with many instances of things going very wrong—the carrier body takes help of bhakti, gyan and karma (randomly, in various orders) as per the shifting surges of this psychic force in the system.

Whichever way it happens in an individual carrier body, I don’t think there is a final arriving. It’s an infinite potential. The so-called ‘final arriving’ in itself a self-set benchmark by the evolved consciousness who rose high, perceived far more than normal people and agreed to a point. It’s just like space travel. You keep travelling and never reach any edge and then accept a conceptually defined reality: Ok, let’s agree to set up this point as the boundary of the space.

At every point, in every individual consciousness and its carrier body, there is the seed of infinite expansion and potential and maybe that draws these energetic storms. And however far one goes with howsoever heightened energy, the mystery always remains the same. It all remains to be known after coming to know everything. There is always more to be realized after realizing everything that is to realize. A bit puzzling though, right? But we have to accept it logically, as long as we believe in the concept of infinity. 

A good journeyman

 You feel lonely on your path and a stranger comes your way. You both walk and smile and become familiar. And at some turn both of you drift apart. Who won't like to go smiling all the way till the end? But still people drift apart because destination is rarely the same. Pain is natural. Memories also cast long shadows from behind. All one can do is to commit oneself to come as a better, more evolved person if at some turn on the path, faraway in future, you come to walk by the side of that same person. This is what I would say doing justice to one's past without wasting present and losing a sight of the future.

Nurturing a soulmate

 I know we have an overestimated view of our own validity and suitability to be an idealistic soulmate, provided we come across someone suitable person for our pre-existing suitability to be a soulmate. Sounds a bit egoistic! In practical life, soulmateship is fabricated and carefully formulated with conscious effort. Soulmates are delicately worked upon relationships. We presume that we are a package and wait for the destiny to make us meet our soulmates. Well, guys it doesn't work that way. Soulmates are made. We never meet someone as soulmates. Don't expect to meet yours. Love, that initial attraction and biological pull, is just the first step. After that it's a long way to a careful walk on the road to turn someone's soulmate.

Likes and dislikes

 

I know it’s very difficult to like everyone around. We are primarily indifferent to the strangers. And that constitutes the major part of humanity around us. Then come those whom we know directly or even indirectly. Among these we have strong likes and dislikes for someone. Let’s start with the ones whom we dislike. Dislike is a pretty heavy value judgment. It leaves long shadows of emotions and thoughts in our brain that eat a lot of energy, block the smooth flow of pranic energy inside, leaving behind niggling tugs of restlessness at our being.

‘Likes’ also have their effects on us. Because likes change into dislikes as well. Change is the ultimate law, we shouldn’t forget. We create a web of dislikes to sustain our likes because the latter seem supportive to our identity. Ultimately both likes and dislikes have to melt because they are two sides of the same coin. But since dislikes leave direct negative impact on our psychosomatic system, it’s advisable to start with dislikes. Cut down on your quota of dislikes, gradually like a sculptor chipping away extra stones to carve out a beautiful idol. Chip away slowly. The extra stone of dislikes is a part of you. Accept it. But it needs to be shed to be the best version of yourself. This is what I mean by ‘making of oneself’. You have the choice to be the same monolith as you were born. There is nothing wrong with that. Just that at the end of the journey you feel guilty for having wasted an opportunity. After all, we have to pass in the court of our own conscience.

Try to be indifferent to the objects of your dislikes. The perception of someone as your enemy should dilute to indifference over a period of time. Once you have no enemies, you will automatically get away from the weight of friendly attachment. I mean you will still like those whom you consider your friends but your liking won’t come from your needs and a fear of support. It will be free of bondage.

Once you become indifferent to your enemies, you become more realistic and natural about your friends as well. You don’t hold too many expectations. Most of the time, our expectations and needs of security pass as our likes and friendliness. You still will have your core group of people who will stay irrespective of your attachment or no attachment. And dear sadhak, as you move in the middle of the path of likes and dislikes, equally distant from both, you don’t feel the rub and friction that you feel on the edges on both sides. Start with being indifferent to your dislikes. Then everything becomes the same over the decades of your life. It breeds a sweet indifference.  Enemies and friends melt in the same pot.

I’m no spiritualist preaching an all-encompassing love. That seems too idealistic to a common man like me. I talk about what is feasible. My only problem with scriptures of all religions is that they would straightaway ask one to be an earthly version of god, an all-loving, smiling, godly entity. It makes you guilty because you are human and would slip and the priests and scriptures stare like tough teachers in your conscience.

I try not to forget that it’s easy to say the most utopian things. But we are no gods. We are poor earthlings and we have our little journeys, the journey of a little species of nature. So my sadhna at the moment is just to cut down on my dislikes for my enemies, whom I sometimes feel like kicking at their bums for their errant ways, to a level of just mild irritated grimace, then to a slight burn at my ego, then to indifference, maybe later to forgiveness and who knows, if I’m lucky, even love them one day.

Dear brothers and sisters, why be a victim of too lofty expectations based on scriptural theses? I know I’m a work in progress. So why should I go itching for enlightenment? I will take my time. I decide my pace and feel happy if on the completion of another year on my journey I see some improvement. To be joyful about tiny gains is a wonderful art. I for one feel like celebrating the day when I am carefully walking and avoid crushing an ant. Why shouldn’t I celebrate? If I don’t have it in me to save elephants, why shouldn’t I turn joyful on saving an ant? Saving an ant keeps the hope of care and consideration alive in me. I’m happy with my little quota of kindness for it saves me from complete darkness.

Lastly, never take life too seriously. What appears on the surface is just an impression forced by our senses on the infinite pools of cosmic fluidity.

A walk on the countryside road

 

India is developing very fast. The roads are being built at a hair-raising speed. We see world class road building technology and engineering equipment at the construction sites. They make roads very quickly, a smooth cakewalk like a knife cutting through cheese. During good old days the money would start from the ministry and it would trickle down to a measly percentage as the famished tar and asphalt was poorly dumped. It would break up in the next rainy season. It was a slow world carried by slow-moving files and still slower archaic road rollers. Now it’s quick and lightning fast. The road-building machinery and construction firms have taken the game to a new high. The roads are good. Any give and take in the process, the subtle game between construction conglomerates and ministries is beyond the understanding of common people like you and me.

The other day I was walking on the narrow countryside road connecting my village to the neighboring village about three kilometers away. It’s a musty humid desultory evening. The monsoon has been lenient so far. There is plenty of grass and bushes by the sides, especially bhang. It’s almost a monotony over the farm-sides at this time. And the poor people who need to opiate themselves to forget the burden of life can have a free hand at it. They expertly move their hands through the leaves and gather the dust to smoke weed. Two old people are walking slowly and there they stand under a jamun tree. One of them, the physically better one, shakes a bough and there is a drizzle of ripe purple juicy berries. His still older companion gathers them in a little plastic bag. They will eat to their full and carry the extra stuff for their respective favorite grandchild.

The road is in bad condition. It is far away from the direct administrative scrutiny. Small-time contactors can take liberties as in the old days. A new layer of asphalt gets washed away after just one rainy season. The farmers hardly complain. Their tractors also don’t grumble about it. And there I come across something reminding me of the good old slow-paced days: the old-style road roller, a faded yellow iron elephant. They are repairing a little section where the road has completely vanished. The triple drum roller—three drums for wheels—slowly whines and winces over soil, gravel and concrete, trying its level best to do its compacting job diligently like an old worker. It’s all iron from head to tail. The diesel engine puffs and huffs, billows big bales of smoke. In comparison to the latest engineering vehicles, it looks a rudimentary horse-drawn roller of the last to last century. There is a lock on the fuel chamber. There is another over the engine chamber. The iron elephant has to spend lonely nights on a solitary narrow road at nights so its engine and fuel have to be saved from the farmers.

When I return by the same path after an hour, I find the iron elephant resting. Two Bihari operators are mounted under the iron canopy and watching videos on their mobiles. A third workman is sitting against the front roller, his legs spread out. I hope he hasn’t put up a challenge that to move ahead they have to go over him.

A snapshot of future

 

For the last couple of centuries we have been a knowledge-driven world. We have been harvesting, inventing and discovering facts with greater speed with the passage of time. So data, and their derivatives called algorithms, will be the new god. A new religion, artificial intelligence, will replace all other belief systems. In medical science the algorithms based on medical statistics will equip the artificial intelligence tools to spin out diagnosis, recommend medication and perform surgeries. The lawyers who used to burn midnight oil to draft their papers on the basis of thick tomes of law books will get all that done at the click of a button. The writers will be replaced by content generation tools. Music, arts, painting, name it anything will see artificial productions. Now the question arises, what will the humans do. We will be the operators. Mere operators, not the doer of things.

See, in ancient times a farmer drew furrows on ground with the help of crude wood and stone implements. Then he used cattle to pull the plough. Still, later he did it with tractor. Now, in the last one he is a mere operator of machinery. So we will be a civilization of operators primarily. Drones, robotic soldiers, unmanned military vehicles will be operated by the soldiers in office. The politicians will operate narrative machines and brand management through social media and other artificial applications of socializing and communicating.

Human mind cannot stop at any limits. It has to continuously spin out newer and newer realities. Virtual realities are a reflection of its urge to break all boundaries and flow out, do more, acquire more, control and manipulate more. The operating minds will be as busy as ever. We will devise more complex structures, problems, institutions, authorities, industry and corporate to adjust the new quantum leap in what we can accomplish. We have to be busy. The population will increase and to adjust the cravings of billions of fresh minds to do something, new avenues need to be set up.

What about the human resource problem? Suppose a team of ten content creators is replaced by one machine and its smart operator. What will the other nine do? They will have to be adjusted in labor intensive jobs. But labor intensive jobs will dry up over a period of time with unprecedented increase in the automation of tasks and processes. I think the civilization will come at loggerheads: operators (the new nobility) on one side and non-operators (the masses) on the other. But it will be so easy for the operators to tame the latter or even eliminate them.

Maybe the institutions of marriage, raising kids, maintaining lineage will crumble up. That might cut down population growth. Or even the operators will find smart ways to check population growth and maintain it at a sustainable level.   

The September coup

 

I won’t term it as nothing short of a coup, September coup. The very same fragile, see-through nest had another dove couple setting home and hearth. A surprise—two eggs survived to hatch. Many factors contributed to it. One, the yard was catless during this period. Only one feral cat spent time in the garden but I doubt it ever hunted even a mouse. Even kittens would spank it. So it spent most of the time hiding and begging a few pieces of chapatti from me when hunger would break all limits. Fifteen days of shraadh also contributed. People left lots of eatables as ceremonial offerings on wall-tops for monkeys and birds, especially crows. So they were well fed, taking little interest in dove kids.

The nest is so small and fragile that one of the hatchlings fell and died. It was a plump kid. Then it rained incessantly for three days. The little one somehow kept clutching at the tiny, tilted nest. The hatchling looked bigger than the nest. Look at the seriousness of the parents in preparing a home for their kids! Hitting a jackpot of luck, it grew to look like a dove. Then it went missing on September 25, most probably served as breakfast to some predator. But still I would consider it a successful hatching from the dove standards because the majority of their eggs don’t survive. Here at least something grew at last to look like a dove.

Climate Change

 

Time sweeps the slate clean and draws a new picture, only to do it again. Climate change has seen unprecedented droughts world over—and flooding—especially Europe and America. As rivers and reservoirs dry, there emerge telltale footprints of the largest animals earth has seen, dinosaurs. Weighing dozens of tons and standing taller than even our buildings who would have imagined they would be wiped out one day. A comet or meteorite strike off the coast of Mexico—leaving an almost 100 mile wide and 12 mile deep crater—unleashed  tidal waves and global winter. The dinosaurs vanished from earth.

Presently, as rivers in France and Germany dry up, we see hunger stones exposed—a kind of famine memorial engravings—telling the tales of human sufferings. The engravers left them as a mark of severe drought and famine that struck the region. When the rivers dried up and the humanity hit the rock bottom of miseries, someone engraved this message on an exposed stone in the river: ‘When you see me, weep.’ Another famine stone has the message: ‘When this stone goes under, life will become more colorful again.’

Grandpa's story

 It was a tough life for Grandfather. His father was bitten to death by bumble bees when he was only twelve. Grandfather had three siblings, all younger to him, two brothers and a sister. Those were the days of family feuds over land. The extended family had lots of domineering males and fearing for her life Grandfather’s widowed mother left the scene. At such a young age Grandfather became the family head. A mother abandoning her children left a deep scar on his heart for which he perhaps carried a heavy grudge against the entire women race. They were so young and had been left to fend for themselves, so maybe he was slightly justified in his discomfort about trusting women in general.

Well, they had to literally survive at the mercy of the clan members who tilled Grandfather’s land. The children toiled in the fields and got survival crumbs. Grandfather was very fond of studies but his life situation never allowed him to go beyond class eight.

When the boys came of age, taking possession of their land was a big milestone to be crossed. A kindly but burly farmer stood by them as they, armed with hayforks and sticks, tilled their first furrows as independent tillers of their share of land.

From the standards of the rustic society, Grandfather was almost a mathematics wizard. The village patwari had to depend on him to calculate and measure land. Grandfather loved playing with numbers. It seemed to be his Ikigai.

He once enrolled himself in the army. A very athletic and agile man he was making a good mark in running and kabbadi as a trainee recruit. His younger brother was also in the army and in the absence of senior menfolk the wives and children faced a lot of problems back home. Seeing their plight, one of his nephews, a zamadar in the British army, got his name struck off from the roll, on the plea that his uncle had run away from home, leaving behind his wife and children at the mercy of fate. In this way, Grandfather’s army career was nipped in the bud.

He was the only educated person in the surrounding area so he was then appointed as a primary school teacher. He held his tiny school in chaupals, where he taught all the primary students gathered in one group at a single place. These never exceeded a dozen or two constituting a single class for all the students at various rungs of academics from class one to five.

My granduncle was serving as a jailor of Multan prison and my father in fact did his schooling from the first to third standard from Multan. Later, Father would boast of his Multan schooling and fondly reminisced that the prisoners treated him like a prince.  

In 1947 the partition-time tragedy broke millions of dreams including Grandfather’s teaching career. There was an influx of refugees. Grandfather was relieved of his teaching duties and his position was given to some poor refugee trying to begin a new chapter here in India after the carnage.

A tragedy then struck the family. Granduncle died of tuberculosis followed by his wife shortly later. My own grandmother also died. So here was Grandfather all alone with his own son (my father) aged around ten and two little sons of the deceased granduncle, one aged five and the other just two. My second granduncle set up his separate family. So Grandfather had the task of rearing three sons singlehandedly. He stood up in his role as a crude version of father and mother both embaled in one unit. He didn’t remarry, fearing the stepmother would turn the life of the three boys very difficult. As I have said he had his own reasons to look at women with apprehension.

He then worked as a farmer and made several entrepreneurial attempts apart from his farming tasks. One of these was brick-making. Those were rudimentary brick-kilns where the bricks were baked in a heap under fuel wood, coal and dung cakes. Being a mathematician he was more into numbers and calculations, taking it as a big mathematical puzzle. His clever partners, who ran field operations, easily duped him while Grandfather was busy with his calculation books.

Grandfather appeared to be farsighted for those times. He found that Bengal had hardly any milk because their cattle were so small and famished. He mustered a band of like-minded farmers. They chose buxom-most buffaloes and these were boarded on a cargo train. The entourage chugged ahead on a long journey to Calcutta. Little did they realize that the Bengali babus hardly had a stomach for Punjabi lactose. They were, and still are, happy with their fish and scores of cuisines coming out of their cultural box. As can be expected the venture failed miserably.

Once, a farmer owed some money to Grandfather. The said farmer and his clan migrated to Pilibheet in Nepal terai and started farming there on leased lands. Grandfather knew how to keep his debtor still in sight. He followed them there with some calves. He thought that grazing on their land would fatten the calves and this would at least cover the interest on the money. The calves grew really well among the lush Himalayan foothill greenery. But there were leopards and tigers ready to pounce and take away their share from Grandfather’s debt recovery scheme. They smartly chucked away Grandfather’s interest earnings that manifested in the form of oodles of muscles on the growing cattle. Grandfather was left with one sturdy bull to show some proof of his venture to the villagers back home. He thought if he could transport that impressive bull to the village, it would help him save his name as an entrepreneur. The journey was stretched over many parts including walking and motor transport. During one leg of the journey the bull jumped from the wagon and broke its leg. Grandfather arrived at the village with a famished, limping bull.

Irrespective of all his setbacks he maintained his passion for mathematics. Its ripples would touch us till matriculation when he tried to solve algebra through his arithmetic techniques because algebra was outside his domain.