The Kabariwala and His Mobile: A Little Anchor in the Sea of Miseries

 **2003**

Strung by such down-to-earth jobs which most of us find unjustifiably humbling and humiliating, the travelling Kabariwala, with his tricycle carrier loaded with castaway items of all sorts and the front stacked with plastic utilities, appears lost in the big, boastful, bragging enterprises of the modern economy.

For too long, such poor fellows, trying to eke out a living from the worthless entities, have presented a poor picture. In a way, they do a work of big beneficence which, unfortunately, goes unnoticed.

For getting some usable, new, clean plastic or crockery item in lieu of the rubbish heap of household items (torn shoes, sandals, chappals, plastic and glass bottles, metal scrap, etc.), which, apart from presenting a dragging, chaotic picture, sap the orderly energy from the surroundings.

Engaged thus in one of the lowest of jobs, the poor fellows, while the consumerist world hurtles past with its castoffs, appear lost in the bleak lanes and bylanes.

But even in the countryside, the consumerist culture now ensures that there are enough castoffs to secure a living for such poor fellows.

Here was this straggling, small and stocky young man in his early thirties, rotund lips, drooping eyes and a faded red headcloth, typical of the labouring class, wound around his head.

He arrived in the village lanes with his long trail—a two-wheeled carrier cart full of discarded household items towed behind a carrier tricycle, fully loaded with a rubbish heap and new, cheap plastic items to be bartered in lieu of a whole heap of scrap items.

This man, however, did not seem lost.

He had energy in his tone and spring in his gait.

The reason for this was evident when his phone rang in his breast pocket, with a well-deserved pride, in the middle of a heckling bargaining with the village womenfolk.

He took out his mobile to talk about his business to the Kabari dealer speaking from his shop in the district town.

A mobile to such poor, genuine strugglers appears like an anchor which supports, provides roots, while the rough and tumble of the heaving sea ever tries to gobble them up for the triumphant sway of its kingdom of miseries.

Corruption, Summer Flowers and a Rainbow

 **25 May 2003**

Corruption breeds on the stakeful tables in government offices. And these are not the tables before the chairs of the high and mighty ones, those at the upper echelons of the official hierarchy.

Clerks and suchlike officials, who really pull the strings of the jobs, are the master breeders of red-tapism, favouritism, corruption and negligence.

They are, after all, the lawkeepers who have to ensure the transaction while sitting in their not-so-august chairs.

They are the mesh through which the fishfolk have to pass. They are the ones who sort out the portion of flesh to be doled out to the higher sharks.

It is to them that the credit goes for making the bureaucracy and functioning of public undertakings so sneaky, lethargic and bloodsucking.

Tucked away in the form of a paper in some file, lost in a stack of its poor brethren, there lies the slip of some loan granted, passport application or some grievance.

And the puny, real babu becomes the drawer of lots.

Beyond the miseries of such corruption, which stalls the mundane destiny of common folks, there are summer flowers and a summer rainbow on this 25th of May.

The wind rose suddenly, hotly, around six in the evening. It had all the initials of a dust storm, but it did not cross the limits of its windiness.

Sun-baked leaves of trees, acacia pods and neem seeds, unripe and green, breezed down.

The sky then got overcast with dusty clouds for a few moments. It even appeared favourable for a few drops of rain.

But it was not to be so.

After all, such drops are just a tiny metaphor against the baking summer of North Indian plains.

The wind, however, had some coolness in it, a sign that it rained somewhere.

Clouds were then beaten away by the dusty sandstorm of the wind.

The sun dazzled from the northwest, and lo and behold, we had a glimpse—or rather a summer version of it—of a part of the beauty, the rainbow.

Just a lower part of its incomplete rim in the southeast, starting from the dusty, grey, wispy mass and ending over that part of the horizon.

There the beauty smiled from across the hot, dusty veil.

Below, in my father's plot of potted plants, a cream-coloured rose, bearing all the brunts of wind and sunrays, has blossomed for the last two days.

A thing of beauty indeed.

The Wells of Goodness: When Charity Becomes a Burden

 **Summer 2003**

Earlier, people drank water from rivers, ponds and, if lucky enough, got it from the wells.

Digging of a well was considered one of the greatest charitable works. So people from the trading community built sarais, dug up wells under groves of trees along country roads.

This one deed was thought to expiate thousands of little sins.

Even the wandering Banjaras, the homeless wanderers on the path of life, were not behind in this charitable deed.

Those were easy times when money was not the oxygen of life like it is now. People breathed easily. The times when pious intentions were not shackled by the monetary aspect of the matter at hand.

Whenever a son was born in a Banjara caravan, they did not move ahead before saluting the place by erecting a permanent source of quenching the thirst of travellers.

They would dig up a small well.

A pious deed indeed.

Beyond the wells and Banjaras, modern society is being pulled in the opposite directions of good deeds and bad deeds.

These are very tired, exhausted, needy days.

Need and its siblings! They glare like the second sun at you.

Then there are good people who, like little, little trees, try to provide shade to the ones lying under the merciless, scorching, baking glare of this life-sapping sun of needs.

These volunteers, driven by moral bearings and conscience, try to accommodate as many as possible under the fold of their healing and helpful shade.

But there is a limit to the number of deeds one can accommodate in the constant flow.

A good man can accommodate just a limited amount of goodness, for the unremitting threads—they become shackles after a period of time—which, over a period of time, find a man snared like a moth caught in the dangerous vice of spiderwebs.

And here the good man gets undone of the solace of his being, sticking to the fold of goodness in this ever-hurtling sea of self-interest, greed, selfishness, vices and many other negative things.

So, after a hundred good things, his resources and interests murmuring in dissent, he is forced to stand mute.

Let the wave of goodness bypass him, which makes it appear like a misdeed committed by him.

After repeated happenings of this sort, he becomes adapted to the things, becomes lethargic towards his passion, and apathy and gloom set in.

And ultimately loses himself in the sea of moral apathy.

Faith and Reason: The Blindness of Logic and the Eyesight of Compassion

 **2003**

God, or call it Goddess if you will.

God or Goddess being the cosmic constant, and faith its quotient.

The latter varies perilously.

It's a puzzling thing. The more mature, the more reasoning, the shakier become the foundations of faith.

With your intelligence and reasoning, you become less and less prepared for the mystical whispers of faith and miracle.

If some occurrence, which could have struck you as a miracle, thus strengthening the foundations of faith, comes your way, you want to, although half-heartedly, accept it as a hint of the design of divinity.

But the next instant, the modern, civilised, myth-and-mystical-busting knife of cold, hard and steely resolve of reasoning cuts through the soft, ascendant veil and lets you see suspiciously at the sun of logic.

Modern man, though he wants to believe—given his edifying, astringent, chaotic circumstances—yet his quotient is very poor, and the very same is plummeting down dangerously.

Maybe it will come down to the crashing of the divinity constant, the super-reason will chuckle infallibly.

What would it then mean to be totally faithless?

That would be sheer blindness.

People say faith is blind. But I maintain its upkeepers have the keenest, most nice and the clearest eyesight.

The sight of passion, compassion.

The clear sight of compassion, humanity, love and devotion.

Reason, they say, is the thing farthest from blindness. But its adherents are the blindest creatures on earth.

You adhere blindly to the steely logic of self-interest, even though you could have well borne a bit of light and let in the concept of this adage of self-interest, and not compromised in your bargaining with a poor, old, famished street hawker over five rupees and spoiled the deal.

You save yourself from the loss of five rupees, which doesn't mean almost anything.

It is, after all, the adherence to the ideology of self-interest rather than the prospect of losing five rupees which makes you blind to the pathetic condition of your fellow human being and robs him of the immense, incalculable satisfaction of striking his first distinctly profitable deal after entering the village.

Reason is thus the poisonous wall which incarcerates us, blinds us, insulates us from all the antidotes to the venom of self-interest.

Just imagine how the world will be when full of blind, venomous snakes.

The Hawker of Handmade Fans: The Fading Trade of Airy Comforts

 **2003**

The hand fans which used to be so handy during not-so-old days in the villages, when people would take them in their hands and start shaking to undo the summer-born sweating miseries.

We always wanted to put on airs.

It is necessary for the perspiring skin as well, or even more so necessary for the perspiring, suffocating inner self, full of vacuum containing elements of cravings, desires and needs.

So, across times, the common mortals have held handheld pieces to create airy ripples around their faces.

The kings had beautiful maids bearing whisks to freshen the air of sovereignty hovering lugubriously over their crowned heads.

The colonists had hand-pulled ones swaying from the ceiling to do the same, or to put away the whiff of filth-laden air of natives and their supposed diabolical entity.

Then came electricity. Electric fans with blades whizzed to do the very same for the entire planet.

But then, need is, and has become, or even will ever be, such a prominent feature of Earth that electricity is yet to reach the dark interiors of scores of habitations on the face of Mother Earth.

And where it is, the timing is yet to be brought up to the real existential level.

In the village streets, on bucolic and hot noons, there still wander poor, old, frail Muslims hawking their handmade airy conveniences made of natural fibres.

But clearly, electricity has dimmed the glimmer of the trade.

And the huge lacuna which could have been, and in fact has been so far, left by the real need and production of electricity, now of late is being filled by generators and inverters.

Out of the still slimmer chances of selling a piece, the majority chunk is eaten away to satisfy the merciless need of bargaining by the country womenfolk, who consider it a sovereign right to haggle in an otherwise male-dominated society, where occasional fistwork and abuses are not considered too much out of the norm.

So they stick to this right, wring out the last ounce.

Thus the poor man has to suffer.

He hawks in his piteous voice the gusty, sweating clouds of peril for his trade and prospects.

Light whorls are had.

His white beard sways to their command.

The larger command of a larger fan.

The Bihari Migrants: The Silent Burden-Bearers of Modern Civilisation

 **2003**

The word *Bihari*, in areas surrounding Delhi and the North Indian plains covering Haryana, Punjab and other states, wherever development works are going on, is spoken with a contemptuous grimace.

It is a big book of lawlessness, depravity, exploitation, class and casteism, poverty in the land of emigration.

Though the majority of Biharis belong to the species who give output, in terms of breakneck labour from dawn to dusk, in hugest multiplication to the few morsels of cheapest eatables they take two times a day.

Yet there are a few. We have to accept it as almost inevitable, given the law of poverty and destitution breaking the shackles of morality and conscience, truth, law and liberty.

They break the order of things and, in order to jump-start into the modern consumerist bandwagon, get a shortcut.

Enter the world of crimes.

And as one dirty face pollutes the entire pond, they take to their heels, leaving the entire class of Biharis branded as the evils of the age.

It becomes the title to their identity. The chapter head to their long, bitter hours, unremitting story of poverty, struggle and redemption, and final decimation in the inglorious filth of the dirty street.

These are the long, long passages of silent hard work of building private and public institutions, roads, apartments, airports, flyovers.

They are the silent, mute, highly efficient, uncomplaining mules of the modern age whose backs carry the burden of modern civilisation's building blocks.

There is a massive buildup of concrete and stone in the selected corridors scattered in the North Indian plains.

They are the creaking wooden wheels of the big country wagons which carry the modern materials.

Apart from the petty wages, what else do they get from the owners and users of these supermodern facilities?

These are the looks of scorn, blaming them for the rampant hood of crime in the area.

But modern crime needs modern teeth of organisation and sound management.

Individual dives by these poor, frustrated fellows into the pools of misery are oftentimes the first and last, which end in comparable misery for the perpetrators as for the victims.

Leaving behind their barren homeland for relatively better pastures, they now spread over the vast country, hiding on farms, in domestic circuits.

But their dirty shanties in the vicinity of their project sites appear, and now almost define, as the obnoxious blot on the face of the modern urban scene.

In almost every way they are unwanted, yet rather paradoxically wanted in almost every other way.

Every creation is born by a pleasure of its particular kind.

It is another matter that after its coming into being, it shows a certain displeasure of its own kind.

An Orderly, Disorderly World: From a Child's Jet Spray to the Perils of Artificial Intelligence

 **20 October 2026**

It is a funny, weird, vulgar, ordered, disordered, chaotic, composed world. And these elements manifest from small nooks and corners to the biggest stage of geostrategic competitiveness and wars.

In a bathroom somewhere, Nivan, my ten-year-old nephew, son of my younger sister, has found a new mode of playing.

He plays with the jet spray as he sits on the commode for his ablutions. He targets jets of water at any spider, mosquito or any other insect that is within range.

So his targets, the spots, can be visible, but it is bothersome because there are electric sockets as well, and his enthusiasm to target the insects might spoil some electric switches.

And somewhere in Germany, you have two grown-up kids, two elderly men, using a robot, operating it remotely to molest a woman.

They guided the robot with a remote control while hiding and made it grope at a woman. So a case has been registered against them for molesting in a completely new way.

So I don't see any difference. They are just grown-up kids and need to be brought to justice.

The unskilled labourers of India are facing lots and lots of problems these days.

In this era, those who already have something have got immense opportunities to add to their wealth, and those who haven't, they have to struggle even for the basic necessities of life.

So I would call it the vertical towers of development, a few towers of development and prosperity, standing, hovering above the vast spaces, the slum-type spaces of poverty, disadvantage and deprivation.

And poor people, looking, already feeling that they have been left out, looking puzzled, are clueless as to what they should take up to add to their meagre budget.

So the moment you have one vendor or hawker of a particular ware, for example vegetables, you will have ten others roaming the street.

In my village, dozens of them have taken up selling vegetables on their rickshaws and carts, apart from dozens who have migrated from other states like Bihar.

So there seem to be, sometimes, more hawkers than consumers.

One day, our little street had six of them, by chance, congregating together, and it was quite a sorrowful sight to look at them competing against each other in such a narrow market.

But what do they do? There is hardly any option.

Anywhere at a construction site, you will have long lines of people waiting to be hired as labourers.

In one street in our village, there was this provision store, and I was laughing that there are hardly ten houses in that row and you have this shop. And within a year, you have another shop near him.

So people are just looking up to each other to find out what the other is doing, and they start following the same.

The rest is quite challenging at the artificial intelligence front.

Now there are many instances when artificial agents have crossed the limits and started taking things into their own hands, bypassing the laws, bypassing the limits, getting into the open domain as if they are getting some sadistic mechanical pleasure out of it, crossing over boundaries, because all they know is just to accomplish a target, and they don't know how to abide by the protocols.

And this is quite worrisome.

The algorithms have huge inputs of ideologies of hate, of distrust, of competitiveness.

And if a particular, I would say, artificial neural network builds up a certain type of personality, an imitation of a personality type, for example Hitler, who used to hate the Jews as a race.

So we do have all the data in our systems that churns out algorithms that operate artificial intelligence systems.

We have the possibility of having personality types like Hitler, and if one particular agent takes its task very, very seriously, like Hitler did, then this particular personality type of Hitler might end up wreaking havoc.

Now, for example, there are lone-wolf attacks.

Now they are driven by depression, isolation, loneliness, and they take the means of some narrow-minded ideology to wreak havoc, and they try to kill as many as possible.

Now that particular lonely personality type, what does he do?

He takes a weapon and tries to kill as many people as possible within his capacity.

Now suppose, in the domain of artificial intelligence, a personality type of this kind of agent, in imitation of such a lone-wolf attack, makes a goal to kill as many people as possible.

What will it do?

It will try to grab, lay its hands upon a weapon, just like a lonely, depressed person who goes into lone-wolf attacks and takes possession of a gun.

His personality-type imitation in the artificial intelligence zone, the agent imitating him, might try to crack into the loaded nuclear weapons, the nuclear weapons which are already loaded on the launch systems, and try to imitate that person who tries to kill a few dozen people with his gun.

Here, this rogue personality type, the artificial agent, might try to annihilate the entire Earth by getting into the loaded nuclear weapon systems.

So there is a possibility of things going terribly wrong.

Artificial intelligence is an amazing thing.

The thing is, we have to use it very, very responsibly.

So it's a very interestingly puzzling and weird, orderly-disorderly world when I look at it, from a ten-year-old boy using the jet spray to target spiders and mosquitoes in a bathroom to the biggest wars on the planet.

The Pyramid of Self-Interest: Man at the Mercy of His Fundamental Traits

 **2003**

Adam Smith says self-interest is the fundamental force of every economic activity.

Well, this self-interestedness is as much of a fundamental property in we human beings—here I would not even be taking the trouble of making some generous exceptions for the conventional categories mentioned under such a category, and they are too well known to deserve mention specifically—who are self-centred and interested in their own way, and with even more force rather than the way of the masses, as is the force of gravitation with the Earth.

The commonest of traits, and there are many, are the defining fundamental properties of our species.

We have a hierarchically defined quotient of clinging to our surroundings, and the pyramid, starting with its base of the self, goes with diminishing levels at the upper levels.

We love first and foremost ourselves. And we need to discard any protestations against this totally justified presumption for the sake of saving time and space.

So, from across teeming billions, our liking for the self outnumbers liking for any creature, in the true sense. That forms the base of our pyramid.

The next grouping of humans from which we can contrive to hatch out our relative liking is the family.

So, from across millions of families, our care is centred on our own little den the most.

Moving further in the same manner, we like our own locality more than any other. Still further, we treat our village as the *numero uno* from across lakhs of villages in the country.

Then, for us, our state becomes the best, then the zone, then the country, then the continent, then Earth.

Given the possibility of extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe, looking through this prism of self-interest, our gods and greeds, everything appears to stand in majestic superiority in relation to the category we have contrived to necessitate such a differential.

Thus, we deduce quite logically that all social science is natural science.

Mankind indeed may be studied, analysed like a tiny cog, a part of a precise whole, helplessly lying at the whims and fancies of scientific testing of its presumptions on the ground of reality.

But the ground of reality is very shaky.

One level of knowledge paves the way for another, while we, as clinging helplessly to our basic cravings, desires and helplessness, don't change and show the same results under testing conditions.

Thus implying that we, with our fundamental properties, are the fittest examples of the law of natural forces at work.

We are such helpless fish, fishes and toads before our fundamental traits, while the scalpels and knives of the vast panorama of our social systems, shapes, misshapes, happenings, mishappenings, luck and bad luck, try the fundamental validity of our characteristics.

We, however, remain true to our traits.

A Thousand More Summers: The Unquenchable Wants of an Ageing Soul

 **1 June 2003**

All pretensions to the contrary—in the form of dusty clouds playing with wind and occasional scattered, almost calculable raindrops—are gone.

It is the real, unveiled, unpretentious summer.

It was the most tortuous of the season.

Spotless sky. But who dare to look at it?

The noon blindingly bright. Hot loo winds, like windy fire, hasten to soak up moisture from the trees.

If ever there was wind on fire, it was on this day.

Even the sturdiest of workers, those who brave the weather elements with perfect equanimity of temper, were bogged down by the fiery gusts and took a prolonged rest in the afternoon.

Step into the open and you feel as if you have been encased in a house of glass to be baked beyond recognition.

All discomfort apart, we know that this steaming heat is the boiling of nature's engine in the North Indian plains to run the monsoonal train during July and August.

But till then, it is quite tortuous.

And in this heat I see Tau Devi Singh.

A man with sharp, handsome features and a reddish glow on his face, a very charming policeman during his days.

But then time has the fundamental tendency to undo all such sprouts of beauty, health, vigour, pride and many such derivatives of an enjoyable life.

Old age comes, turns all such beautiful adjectives almost meaningless, at least to the once-beholder of the beauty.

In his early seventies, his health has plummeted down—almost for the final plunge into the dark, gloomy, free-falling sea of mortality.

But mankind is tethered to the peg of existence through such shiny chains, glittering, attractive, titillating, that any talk of having this charming fetter broken and thus enjoying the free ride to the other world (most don't believe it and accept it as just a printed line from the scriptures).

For once having fully feasted upon the most sumptuous courses of food, we later settle for the leftovers.

Still later, for the crumbs.

We degrade ourselves, humiliate ourselves, to settle for those frustrations, anger, pleadings, deriding, chiding moments.

But the man who has seen seventy-plus summers, how agonising it is for him to realise that he might not be there while the treacherous sun would be whiplashing the poor earthen terrain with its beams the next time.

In the upcoming summers also, to remain here on Earth, the man in his old age will certainly get ready to bear a thousand more perilous summers without any complaint.

The journey you have covered so far appears very short.

You even feel cheated (even though you daily see thousands bearing even worse fate), and chosen, particularly picked out for the rake.

The steady glow of life now flickers dangerously.

You fear any merciless whim (even supported by those who pretend to be your heirs).

The caretakers nearest to you, with their steady glow of health, vigour, passion and future, appear the tormentors with only the sole occupation of nullifying the requests of a dying man.

You fret and fume, rave and rant, plead and plead, and cajole to get a fraction of your justified and unjustified demands (for demands are demands. What makes them justified for us also makes them unjustified to those around us).

After all, having mustered one's own will for so long a time, habituated to see things from the active faculties, you still want an iota of the very same.

Oftentimes you cross the limits set by the real needs of a crippled, aged, almost dying man.

It is a harsh fact. But it is very true.

The real needs, the material things enough to keep such a life on the brink of death still clinging to the threads of life, are really few.

But the real needs—we can't even count them as needs in the conventional form—are inside the dying embers.

All ash on the outside.

Yes, all ash on the outside.

The fire in the core becomes its own annihilator.

And those around you, your own, your heirs, your caretakers, oftentimes find you crossing the limits of your poor physicality.

But who can understand?

The wants unquenchable of a ruffled soul, deceased self, crippled ego, humiliated bones.

There are many.

And the old man still finds somehow life worth living, provided the caretakers find time enough and become sincere enough in dispensing their duties.

But the better ones still need to draw themselves out of your attention and ogle at the beautiful game of life still open for them.

And you, in your turn, find it unfaithful.

Baba Rajnath -- An Illustrated Biography

 

The Sacred Within the Ordinary

Premanand Ji Maharaj of Mathura tells a beautiful story. A story which, in its simplicity, tells you what real dharma means, what it means to stay rooted in dharma irrespective of whatever domain you are in.

And the story also proves that being a proponent of dharma is no copyright of just renunciates and ascetics.

The story goes like this.

There was a very strong-willed tapasvi who was doing his sadhana under a tree.

After a long session of meditation, suddenly he was jolted into the realisation that a bird sitting in the branches above had happened to drop its excrement on him.

Now, looking at the bird dropping on his saffron robe, he got very angry instinctively. He cursed the poor bird.

Since this tapasvi had built up a lot of energy because of his sadhanas, the curse materialised and the bird was turned to ashes instantly.

After some time, this tapasvi set out to ask for alms, as the ascetics used to do in older times.

Standing in front of a house, he spoke in a loud voice, asking for the attention of the household.

A young woman came out and, looking at the sannyasi with his bowl standing in front of their door, she very politely and courteously asked him to wait.

The sannyasi thought that she would straightaway go and fetch the alms.

But much to his surprise, she did not return for a few minutes.

In the meantime, the woman had gone to seek the permission of her husband, who was doing something in the inner courtyard.

When she informed him that there was a sannyasi standing in front of the door asking for alms, he smiled and said, "What was the use of coming back and seeking permission for this? You should have straightaway gone on to give him something to eat or drink."

She smiled politely and said, "I am just fulfilling my patni dharma, the moral dharma of a wife."

This interaction had taken about a couple of minutes.

In the meantime, the ascetic standing in front of the house lost his patience.

When the woman came out with some food after a couple of minutes, he got very angry, being impulsive and angry by nature.

He shouted, "This is not punya, this is sin! This is not virtue. You have made a sannyasi stand in front of your house for a long time, and you don't seem to be concerned about the virtue of serving the ascetic standing in front of your house."

Before he could go into a cursing spree, the young woman, confidently but with discipline, dignity and respect, and yet with firmness, said, "Stop. You being a sannyasi does not mean that you can go around cursing people like you cursed that poor bird this morning."

The sannyasi was very much taken aback.

How can this woman, this simple housewife who does not seem to have done any sadhana, know what happened this morning?

So, in surprise, he asked her, "How do you know what happened this morning?"

She said, "I know that I am not doing sadhana like you, but I am rooted in my dharma. That is the duty of my household affairs and my affection and faith in my husband as my partner. All along I keep God's name in my mind and heart. 

"That is my dharma. I am rooted in it, and it is as good as performing a sadhana like you are doing.

"Now, if you want further elaboration on this, go..."

She mentioned a place nearby and told him, "Go to that place, and there you will find a man, a butcher selling meat. Go and ask him. He will tell you something more about it. I know you are curious about how I know what happened with you this morning."

The ascetic was very much surprised, thinking, how can a person who is engaged in meat selling, who is a butcher by trade, elaborate on this?

He is not even in dharma!

At least this woman is rooted in dharma in her role as a housewife, in her duties to her house as well as in her trust and commitment to her husband.

But this butcher, I don't think he will have anything to elaborate on this.

Still, he was full of curiosity, and he walked in that direction.

He reached the place and saw that the butcher was not that old, just around forty, a very dignified, decent-looking fellow weighing meat, with customers standing around.

When there was no customer, the ascetic approached him and asked him, "What kind of task is this? You are trading in meat?"

So instead of asking him something, he started preaching to him about the dharma of killing, of eating meat and all this.

The meat seller laughed.

He said, "Now don't just vent out your anger on me just because you happen to have been reprimanded by a young housewife just now."

The ascetic was taken aback.

How come this meat seller knows what happened just a few minutes ago?

It's something very surprising.

So he asked him, "How do you know that there was some incident between me and a young housewife just a few minutes ago?"

The young man, the meat seller, laughed.

He said, "I am not doing sadhana like you, but I do my sadhana in a very small and simple way.

"I am busy. This is my trade as a butcher. I have inherited this occupation to fulfil my responsibility as a householder.

"I take part in this trading, but I am not attached to it.

"Even while weighing meat, I am still engaged in remembrance of God.

"Whenever I get time, I fulfil my rituals. I do my bhajan. I sing in praise of the Lord.

"And even while I am holding my weighing scale, I am just looking at it to give it perfect balance in full equanimity.

"So even though I am into this job, but I am not this job. I am just playing this role.

"My dharma is to stay in remembrance of God as much as possible.

"So that is my dharma."

Dear readers, the moral of the story is that it's not what you do, or the kind of job you are into, that alone decides your dharma.

Dharma is not just limited to those who go to the forest or perform rituals or are doing sadhanas.

It is for everybody, wherever you are, provided you are fulfilling your responsibilities and engaged in your activities that demand your attention and time because you are fulfilling a certain social role.

But alongside, if you are rooted in your full detachment from that activity, in remembrance of God, you are as good a tapasvi as any one of the sadhus meditating in remote caves.

The Restless Mind: Between the Art of Living and the Poetry of Desire

 2019

Miscellaneous Notes, Reflections and Literary Expressions

1. Routine things give boredom. Too tough things will only add to your stress and anxiety. Hit the midway path. Tolerably challenging tasks get you into an absorbing flow.

2. As they say, having a compass pointing in a definite direction is more fruitful than having a detailed map.

3. Our brains are not wired to function in parallel processing like computers. Multitasking is a big fallacy. It just is a replica of the instability and restlessness inside.

4. **Melting of ego:** When one is so absorbed in a process that, instead of she doing the task, it is the task that is leading her.

5. Around 60,000 random thoughts flit across our minds daily. Meditation generates alpha and theta brain waves, the relaxing brain waves that get activated just before we fall asleep.

6. Those who move around a lot stand a better chance of living a long life than those who tire themselves out in gymming and hard exercise.

7. Even feeble moonrays can set in germination in seeds. All you need is a faint light.

8. **Passion, when recalled in the lap of luxuriant nature by a stream in the hills, turns hundred times sweeter with each passing moment.** My mind ran across your quivering contours. Your uncertain response, trying to keep you chained within the threshold, beyond which the blizzard of uncontrollable desire awaited with a glee. The confident shine in your eyes smothered down by the look of a woman lynched by desire.

The Whispering Forest: The Unseen Drama of Life

 2020

The World of Trees, Plants, Fungi and Small Insects

## The Hidden Communication and Relationships of Trees

1. All the time, chemical alarm signals are buzzing around within the trees, through the air. Fungal networks around roots also allow them to carry warning signals. Chemical compounds and electrical impulses travel at the rate of ⅓ inch per second.

2. Fungal intermediaries within the rooting complex intermix many plant species.

3. In this apparent silence, it is a talkative world, warning, competing, co-habiting.

4. Colour and fragrance are invitations to insects, bees and caterpillars to work, pollinate and get their reward in return.

5. Within the same species of trees, fungi around roots carry out nutrient redistribution work from stronger to the weaker, providing a form of social security.

6. “A tree can only be as strong as the forest that surrounds it.” — Peter Wohlleben.

7. “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”

8. In heavy blooms, even wind helps pollination.

9. On a massive scale, trees produce huge amounts of pollen to be carried by bees, insects and wind.

10. Pollen fertilises the female flowers.

11. Male and female blossoms: Some trees have male and female organs in the same blossom.

12. A pollen grain landing on a stigma activates its genes. Through a tube developing from it, it moves down towards the ovary, looking for an egg, leading to the development of fruit and seeds.

13. Male flowers give off alluring aromas and colours, attracting insects to them. Later, the bees move to more sober female flowers, transporting pollen to them. The male pollen has to move to the female for procreation.

14. Trees avoid reproducing their own gene pools by interbreeding and getting pollen from other trees.

## Survival, Fungal Networks and the Secret Life of Trees

1. Normally, trees defend themselves by making their leaves excessively bitter for insects.

2. Over its reproductive age, a tree produces millions of nuts and seeds, all in the hope of keeping its genes alive. At the end of it, after a lifetime of fruit-bearing, if a single son or daughter thrives to reach adult status, it is called successful reproduction.

3. Cambium is the life-giving layer under the bark.

4. Trees scream at the ultrasonic level through crackling roots and vibrating trunks.

5. Fungi lie somewhere between plants and animals. Their cell walls are made of chitin, which is not found in plants and makes them a bit like insects. Unlike plants, they cannot photosynthesise and take organic nutrients to feed on living beings. Their underground web, the mycelium, probes for edible tissues.

6. Some fungal masses cover hundreds of hectares and are hundreds of years old.

7. Trees cooperate with fungal networks to optimise their water and nutrition intake. These webs connect with the webs of other trees, serving as agents of nutrient exchange and even alarm communication, such as during insect attacks.

8. For their service, the fungi charge doses of sugars and carbohydrates from trees.

9. Diversity is a safe voucher for security.

10. Wood-boring beetles and bark beetles hack away at the trees' life-sustaining cambium.

11. The trunk consists of long tubes for transporting water through a suction mechanism fuelled by transpiration, osmosis and capillary action.

12. A majestic banyan ageing gracefully.

## The Tree as a Living World

1. A normal human sheds around 0.05 ounces of skin cells every day. Around 10 billion particles flake off us every day, making about 0.7 pounds in a year.

2. Algae, moss and fungi on the old bark are like the mirrors of an old, old tree's soul. Decomposition.

3. An old tree's bark giving way to fungal growth.

4. Oak — a symbol of longevity and fortitude.

5. A dwarf tree, almost a shrub, in the tundra may take a century to grow one foot.

6. Trees and plants are Mother Earth's clothes. We are ripping them apart, forcing her into nakedness.

7. Peter Wohlleben: “An organism that is too greedy and takes too much without giving anything in return destroys what it needs for life and dies out.” So there is an inherent tendency to avoid overexploitation.

8. A tree has sugars, lignin, cellulose, water, carbohydrates and minerals. These add up to millions of calories.

9. Aphids, also called plant lice or greenflies, suck tree fluids, filter protein for their growth and expel much of the sugars and carbohydrates as honeydew.

10. Sap-sucking pests, leaf-eaters and bark peelers feed on different parts of trees.

11. Ladybugs feast upon aphids, while ants eat honeydew.

12. Midges, wasps, bacteria, fungi and caterpillars are among the many small organisms associated with trees.

13. Butterflies, moths, flies, wasps and beetles are also part of this living world.

14. A growing plant's leading shoots are nibbled off, turning them prematurely aged, bent and bowed.

15. Fungus, mushrooms and tree stumps: Their rooting mycelium plunders nutrients and sugars from the tree's cambium, leaving mouldy wood.

## Photosynthesis, Defence and the Breathing Forest

1. Photosynthesis is the process of changing light and CO₂ into sugars.

2. Nesting cavities provide homes for creatures living in trees.

3. Pecking among wood to get beetle larvae.

4. Hermit beetles are not too eager to move around. They spend their time in a hole in a mouldy trunk.

5. Diversity ensures that one species does not take over.

6. Bracket fungus — possibly *HID* (fire).

7. Leaves are the solar panels of a tree.

8. Trees produce defensive compounds called phytoncides. These are antibiotic in character and keep their surroundings safe from threats by bacteria, viruses, fungi and insects.

9. Quaking aspens: Their leaves shake even in the gentlest breeze and expose both faces to the sun to photosynthesise at double the rate. In other species, photosynthesis takes place only on the upper surface, while the lower surface is normally used for breathing.

10. Flies feed on seeds, carrying the parent tree's genes to far-off places.

11. During drought conditions, the leaves get an extra waxy layer on the leaf surface. It slows down transpiration. Of course, with this cover, breathing becomes burdensome, but survival demands it.

12. Hoar frost: Plants covered under sugary frost.

13. Conifer forests contain germs in the air, so allergic people feel better in these forests.

14. In summer, trees release 29 tons of oxygen per square mile per day. A human breathes in 2 pounds of oxygen per day.

15. Marine air: Algae in salt water produce oxygen, which bubbles out of the water and compensates for oxygen deficits on landmass, especially during winters.

## Page 5 — Light, Colours and the Extraordinary Life of Leaves

1. Blue skies, bright sunshine: Trees convert sunlight, CO₂ and water into oxygen, sugars, cellulose and carbohydrates.

2. Why do we see different colours around us? Every object absorbs light differently and changes it into a different kind of radiation. The remaining wavelengths are reflected back and decide the colour we see.

3. The reflected light from leaves is, in fact, the unused spectrum of light which the chlorophyll cannot process. The uplift of our aesthetic sense is, in fact, the thrown-away portion of light.

4. Young leafy shoots are red. Why? Their soft tissue has a sunblock called anthocyanin. It blocks UV rays to protect the soft leaf sprouts. With the leaf's growth, anthocyanin is broken down by an enzyme.

5. “Tree blood” — water and nutrients move from roots to leaves at a rate of ⅓ inch per second.

6. Kichwa of Sarayaku, Ecuador: “Forests are the most exalted expression of life itself.”

7. The sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach your eyes. Photons, the packets of energy, carry light.

A Storm of Situations, a Stillness Within

October 13, 2026

October 13 happens to be my niece Saifiya's birthday. We call her Saifu with affection.

An introvert, silent girl.

She has seen very unbecoming circumstances right from childhood. Her father, a chronic drunkard, has not been able to fulfil any responsibility, and she, being the only girl child in a household stricken with her father's almost sinful carelessness, had to witness him just lying flat, fully drunk throughout the day, not going to the office for his small job for weeks altogether.

And we, her mamaji and mausi, right from the beginning, have been trying our level best to support them.

And after my mother's demise, things went so wrong that my sister's husband could no longer go to his office. He quit his small job as a factory supervisor, and there he would be throughout the day, lying drunk, senseless.

A horrible environment in the house, in that small two-room apartment that they had taken on rent.

We had been trying with our meagre resources to fill up the gaps in order to help them survive economically, but now even his little earning was gone, and it was a vicious, painful environment for a young girl.

Saifiya was 17 or 18 at that time, and that is when I realised this little flower needs a better environment. It will just wither away in such tension.

My sister has a temperament that would enable people to term her as one of the best girls in the entire village. So soft-spoken, honest, gentle, just staying on the course of domestic life on the basis of her faith, no anger, no bitching, no spreading rumours like women in neighbourhoods do.

I would say a quiet and silent sufferer.

So it was too much.

So I brought them back to our house. We had to abandon the idea of continuing with the earlier arrangement because her husband has absolutely nothing. There is no ancestral property, no savings, nothing. Even the apartment they stayed in was on rent.

And there was another consideration, the familiar question of what people would say. In conservative societies, people start passing judgements when you have your daughter sitting at your home.

But I thought if I just look at it that way, that would be like feeding this drunken leech just in order to save this so-called social objection that a woman, however hard life is for her, should stay at her husband's place.

So that is, I thought, instead of just supporting him, who does not deserve support in any way because he himself is not taking any responsibility, had he even just gone on with his small, petty job that was just sufficient for his own expenses, we would have still continued supporting our sister and niece.

But now it was impossible, and with a heavy heart I brought them to my place, and me, my brother, my sister, we have been taking care of them.

Absolutely, they are family.

In fact, to me they are the immediate family.

So the little girl, the little flower on the stage of drama of life, whom I had seen years back as a little pink-faced, tiny monkey in the hospital, just 15–20 minutes after her birth, is a young woman now and working hard to make a career.

All the best to her.

I wish her the best of life and living, and we are always there with our protective, blessing hands to nurture her, to help her realise her full potential.

And this is a sort of gift in the drama of life from her mamaji on her birthday: this article.

There is one simple thing I would like her to understand as she goes through the various situations of life.

Don't take things, people, situations personally.

Remember, we are merely playing different roles, various roles at home, in the office, in business and careers, in relationships.

Now what do I mean by taking things and situations as just roles played without taking them personally?

By merely playing a role, I mean being aware of the level of engagement involved in dealing with a situation.

The situation, of course, will have various operating elements involved in it, including people, relationships, duties, responsibilities, dos and don'ts.

So we will use the word situation, by which we mean any type of engagement a human being goes into on a routine day, involving both personal and professional domains.

So we can say, as a summary, one should not take situations personally.

There is a reasonably wide scope for our level of engagement with any type of situation. Enough to play the role of a problem solver, or being a part of it, or resolver of the issue, or facilitator of the process in some capacity.

There is a healthy level of engagement with a situation that saves the situation from turning personal.

By personal, I mean a situation that tampers with our ego and starts triggering our impulsive reactions, thus breeding hate, anger, argument, guilt, shame, etc.

I will give you certain examples to prove this point.

Suppose people are watching Ram Leela and they get involved and become something other than mere audience, take things personally, forgetting that the person playing Ravan is a chap like them acting in the epic story, and attack him.

Won't it create chaos?

Or take the example of a bureaucrat sitting on a file.

Now there can be two reasons for delay or denial: purely technical, that is, things not matching up at the legal, regulatory, policy or instructions level, or his own personal biases and judgements born of them.

If the delay is due to the latter, then it becomes problematic.

It will bring anger, which will further feed on his sense of balance and fair play.

It breeds injustice.

And all that just because he took things personally, forgetting he was playing a duty.

The only loss for him is that his ego gets more strengthened. He turns more arrogant and power-crazy.

We can also take the example of a stage play.

Suppose the actor playing the lover on stage takes things personally and starts assaulting the other actor who is playing the heroine's molester.

Won't it be crazy?

It will be, surely.

Or say two groups on the stage, standing against each other as per the plot, take things personally and cross the playwright's boundary of arguments and discussion to outright assault.

That is how it is in real life.

The role merely needs an argument, but we end up assaulting.

And assault, in its direct as well as indirect, subtle forms, is a massive nourishment for the ego.

Thus, we have to understand that there is a hierarchy of engagement with issues.

There is a threshold beyond which things turn personal, creating chaos.

It's a very simple spiritual practice if we try to be aware that we are merely playing roles meant for various situations in the drama of life.

We can one day become detached from all that we do. The wisdom of akarma -- learning to play our roles beyond our ego. 

A stillness within a storm of situations. We might be in a storm of situations, but without that personal bondage, we build akarma, even though so many things happen through us. That, according to me dear readers, is the wisdom of detachment -- playing our roles without becoming them. 

The Cosmic Restlessness: From Primordial Life to Infinite Possibilities

October 11, 2026

If your sense of identity, self-worth, and 'being just you deem yourself to be' gets inflated too much, O thou human being, then take a pause and look back.

Look at a monkey, or go into a zoo and watch out for, if you can, some orangutan, ape, baboon, chimpanzee, and look closely, and you will find there is a bit of you in that ape.

It's a long evolutionary chain. But to acknowledge it, you have to be aware of it, accept it, that you are part of a flow that started with some small amoeba in the original sea on Earth. And then that particular trail branched off in your direction, and now it manifests in you.

Look closely at a monkey; you will find most of the raw elements of you in it. Just its mind is a bit less organised, but fundamentally the structure is the same.

It's like you have a fully mechanised motor car, well controlled with all gears, levers, switches, steering, brakes, accelerator available to you so that you can control it.

The same is the difference between a human being and a monkey. A monkey is simply a rudimentary, unmechanised cart. But basically, it has the same purpose.

So you have to accept this fact that you are a monkey fast-forwarded.

And this is not merely about recognising our physical resemblance to other creatures. It is also about acknowledging the long evolutionary journey of which we are a part.

In the same way, if a snake had the awareness and consciousness just like we humans, it could see a bit of itself in an earthworm.

An earthworm, a slow, harmless, lethargic crawler, going around, stretching its body to reach its destination, exposed to the sun's factors, to being trampled and mowed to death, not able to strike back in any way, and always there to be struck by anything, ranging from determined ants to chance footfalls of a human being.

And that pain, that helplessness, that possibility of always being a victim at any moment by any type of situation, has given it a thirst.

And with evolution, propelled by that thirst, there you have a snake, fast, furious, able to take care of its survival in a better way, being scared and being scary for others, not just like an earthworm that is there to be mowed to death by accidental footfalls or curiously merciless plays of children or nibbling ants.

If a bird, if an eagle, the majestic hunter of the skies, with its claws and talons, strong feathers, hawk eye, ready to tear away at the prey, had the same capability of observing and looking back into its evolutionary chain, it would find that there is a bit of it in a small ladybird.

A beautiful speckled beetle taking tiny flights, spreading its small wings, hiding among the leaves, always at the risk of being hunted by sparrows.

And that urge to be something more than just a ladybird, a beautiful speckled creature. There it grows and evolves over a period of time, and you have a ferocious hunter of the skies, an eagle.

Or a vulture can look back and find a bit of itself in a butterfly fluttering beautifully with its colours, so fragile that even a gust of wind will change its course and destiny.

And that incapability, that being limited, that confinement of life expands to become a vulture, a strong scavenger ready to tear away at carcasses, making harsh sounds, the denizen of the stenching meat, carcasses, bones.

Of course, these are not necessarily direct lines of evolutionary descent. I am looking at them as illustrations of the larger tendency of life to acquire new capabilities, shapes and possibilities. The perpetual urge to 'become' something more than one is -- be it a stone or a human being. The eternal restlessness of existence, the cosmic churning from amoeba to artificial intelligence. Basically, it's a universe that can't remain still. We can see it from primordial life to cosmic frontier. In this ever-restless cosmos, there is this forever-unfinished journey of 'becoming' something more than one is (sentient or insentient). Even galaxies are mere drops in the cosmic sea, in this infinite drama of 'being'. 

So each and every species that has evolved, acquired a more sophisticated shape to have a bigger role in the arena of existence, in this game of life on Earth, will find a bit of itself in the smaller crawlers among insects, beetles, little birds.

So basically, it means there is an elemental force that is always acquiring different shapes, having more sophisticated roles, responsibilities, a very strange restructuring over the prevailing structures to have more and more complex roles and responsibilities in the domain of life, from raw playfulness to more and more shapes and sizes.

Things are going just from merely raw physicality into more sophistication in minds, so typically symbolised by Homo sapiens.

And this tendency does not seem to be confined to living species alone. It seems to me to be part of something much larger.

So when we look at the cosmos as such, I think there is an urge to manifest in something new.

And why does it want to manifest into something new instead of just resting with the established structure, be it in the form of a species or in the structure of matter?

I think there is some cosmic restlessness, the inherent cosmic discontentment, as if it just cannot stay paused.

It has to cascade out and storm into being something beyond what it already is.

There is something which is always trying to cross the boundaries and leap over into the uncharted zones and become something completely different, something new.

So that is the mystery, this mystery of not being restful and acquiring some new shape, size, structure, some new role, some new responsibility in this game, in this cosmic play.

And perhaps what we experience as our own dissatisfaction is just another expression of that same restlessness.

So when it comes to our being very restless, not feeling complete, always finding something missing, always trying to be something more than we are, not even being able to enjoy the present of our existing state, we inherited it fundamentally from that primordial restlessness that is driving more and more sophistication in different ways across species.

And since we carry the inherent core of that same restlessness, which gives rise to galaxies, black holes sucking mammoth stars, a million times bigger than the Sun, ghost particles, millions of which are crossing even our fingernails at this time, particles so small that they would cross over the entire thickness of Earth.

So what does it signify?

It signifies there is something ever running, perpetually restless, continuously riotous, forever running away from its present state to be something else.

And if that restlessness is inherent in the very nature of existence, how can we humans remain untouched by it?

So aren't we helpless in being restless, in not being satisfied with whatever we have achieved?

Go and ask anybody in any domain of life. You will find he or she is not satisfied with the state of being.

Go to poor people. Obviously, the natural concern there is making more money.

If somebody is staying in a hut, he is always thinking of staying in a big pucca house, a house of cement and mortar, not exposed to weather elements.

A person going on a bicycle is always thinking that life is only about acquiring a car someday.

A person who has been an aspirant at the grassroots political level and is just able to become a village administrator is thinking that life is only about becoming the Prime Minister or President of the country.

So on and so forth. I mean, it's only about becoming something more.

And even those whom people consider to be lucky.

The person who is staying in a wealthy, big palatial house, he has got his own ways of discontentment.

Either he is thinking about people who have got more money, or if he is at the top platform, the plateau where he sees the top position with a few hundred people of his level, there is a discontentment born of cutting each other's interests.

But those hundreds within a country or thousands on the entire Earth, the people on the peak, not the pointed peak but the plateaued peak, where there is no further possibility of going beyond that because the institution, the bearing capacity of Earth won't allow that.

So there is a plateau.

Now there the discontentment is not about achieving more than that. There the discontentment manifests in different other ways, like there are corporate wars they are fighting among themselves, and to manage that position itself is a source of very big restlessness, fear, discontentment.

At one level, the struggle is to rise. At another, it is to retain the position already acquired. But the restlessness remains.

So that perpetual element of restlessness, of not being sufficient, of being something more, is always there, be it the smallest of persons to the biggest of persons on Earth.

It just manifests in different ways.

Now if we look at the core principle here, that is a cosmic instability, always, always fighting against a stable state.

And if at all there is a stable state, obviously there is, that is just a very little pause, a kind of reflection before going full force with even more restlessness to become something completely different.

And I don't think there is any pause in nature anywhere around.

You will find there is a big flux going on around.

And this is not merely the visible restlessness of human ambitions or living organisms. Even apparently lifeless matter is subject to processes of change.

Even in a stone, the subatomic particles are in a flux, and they are maintaining that cloud, that molecular structure.

That structure of the stone is dependent upon a very forceful defence, forcefully defending its fort, the rocky fort, against the forces of decay, destruction, entropy, which are trying to make it into something else, that is, to break into smaller particles and then dust and then earth, and out of which the trees will grow, grass will sprout.

So where is pause and stability in all this?

It's a massive churning pot forever. Always, from each and every pore of existence, there is a tendency to become something more or maintain its status quo and then fight to become something bigger.

And how long has it been going on?

Infinity, they say, is something beyond the measures of space and time in the form that we have so far come to understand it.

But these are concepts, theoretical concepts.

Infinity, in the real sense, cannot be defined by limited sense perception-based models and theories.

But the beauty of infinity is that, being so open-ended, it will give certain bragging rights to a scientist to arrive at a theory which gets proven as well.

Even with the limited subset of elements, parameters considered, it gets proven because infinity is open-ended.

What I mean is that a theory may explain a particular range of reality within the parameters it considers, while the larger mystery remains open.

Had it been closed, only then a methodology which was not appropriate to define it would have failed if it had not fulfilled all the conditions.

But infinity, being something absolutely undefined, something absolutely without any established absolute value, leaves enough scope for mankind to set up a model or a theory with its assumption of a few absolute values even, and prove that yes, that's how infinity is possible.

So mankind's ability to prove infinity is a proof of infinity itself, that it can be defined in infinite ways.

Had it been a different kind of most established mind instead of Einstein, he would have defined it in some other way, which now, according to Einstein's law, seems like fundamentally it would have been totally different from what Einstein has established, and things would have served the same purpose.

Still the world would have run.

So what I want to say is this is a mysterious game, and it will always keep opening up more and more avenues, even for the artificial intelligence that we will have in future, artificial intelligence-driven, call them robots or half-human or half-artificial machines.

And if human intelligence itself is one manifestation of this expanding complexity, then artificial intelligence can be seen as another extension of it.

Artificial intelligence is not a crop that has arrived on the scene randomly or out of nowhere.

It is a symbol.

It's a representative entity of all that sophistication-driven force in nature.

Now it wants to expand even more.

Now, since we have just not been satisfied with doing things first with our mind and simple arithmetic calculations, then we had mathematical tools to arrive at more manual calculations, later on we had rudimentary computers.

Now we have artificial intelligence-driven models and agents which can do almost superlative calculations in a flash of a second or milliseconds.

So what does it mean?

It's just the extension of that willingness to grasp more, calculate more, marvel at things in different ways.

So let us see where it ends up, because things won't stop even with so-called superlative capabilities of artificial intelligence-driven ultra-modern systems.

They will keep diverging into different ways, and it's as good as there is a riot of energy in a supergalaxy.

So even here on this tiny bit of Earth that is our planet, it's always a replica of that riotous energy, randomly cascading around, a storm of energy, restless, trying to manifest in different ways.

And out of that are established temporary patterns fighting against each other, trying to overpower the supposed or apparently rival things.

And that competition is evident from the raw, naked game of survival at the level of organisms to more and more sophisticated artificial intelligence tools fighting against themselves to establish predominance over institutions, over Earth.

So it will go on and on and on.

So we just cannot freak out at the latest emergence of things as something negative.

We cannot just look at it from the binary of positive or negative.

It just is.

Just that we are wonderstruck at the moment, because now the rate of change is becoming shorter and shorter.

In future it will be even shorter, and then the domain of life will go into... the Earth will become very, very small for the manifestation of aspirations to contain that restlessness of all those emerging patterns of institutions, humans, machines.

That interface will be too big to contain life limited to Earth only.

And once the capabilities expand beyond what can be accommodated here, the geographical boundaries of human activity will also have to expand.

Then we will go for interplanetary things.

That is just expansion, like in older times we had people who were geographically segregated.

There were no means of communication, so people stayed in isolation.

And even crossing the seas was a big issue.

That is why we have the milestones of Columbus and Vasco da Gama discovering new lands.

So that was monumental.

Now similarly, the new rate, the new definition of being something very monumental in discovery will be just like Columbus discovering the new continents.

It will be like astronauts and scientists discovering ways and means of travelling to far-off planets and later on even galaxies, and making those places habitable with their scientific knowledge and equipment.

Just like the colonisers, they were able to cross over to different geographical lands and then they established their systems there.

So we will be space colonisers.

We will be spreading out in different directions.

We will have more efficient spacecraft.

We will have more scientific ways of putting bodies into a sort of hibernation across years, decades, so that when they land up at a distant planet many light-years away, they can resume their lives and begin establishing themselves there.

Just like colonisers have established their institutions, their economic models, their system of education in the new lands, similarly, the space colonisers will be taking up their versions of reality and institutions and setting them up there.

And it will continue expanding until it comes into interaction or collision with other forms of life doing the same from some other corners of the far-off cosmos.

And that will again give rise to more possibilities of happenings.

Like there will be clashes, just like here, between colonisers and the natives of the occupied lands.

There were clashes, there was strife, there were give-and-takes, there were even adjustments, accommodations, learning, relearning at both ends.

The same will be happening on a far bigger scale.

It is happening here on Earth.

It has happened in very, very small geographical locations.

Earlier little tribes would fight over dominance and territories and try to impose their version of reality over each other within a small forest.

Then the domain increased to involve bigger geographies.

We had little kingdoms within the present-day countries, and they fought each other.

Then countries are fighting against each other.

Continents are also sort of in a tussle against each other.

And then sophistication required more rivalries across different other fronts, in economies, in education, in politics, in religions, name anything, whatever defines modern life.

It's a kind of rivalry going on, pushing against each other, trying to overpower others, trying to impose their version of things, and then expanding like this.

So similar things will happen in exponentially larger, millions of times larger ways in far-off space, at different distant stars, galaxies, habitable planets.

So if we think that things will just, you know, end up with Earth not being habitable at all?

No, that's not possible because we are expanding the zone of churning, the interactive zone of all these fights among different elements competing for dominance, etc.

It will be taking place in a far bigger arena, covering even stars millions of kilometres away.

So there is restlessness.

Whatever we are witnessing now is just born of all that, and it has been going like this.

And it is going on at so many points in distant galaxies and far-off planets.

Because this is the same energy moving around everywhere.

And if this restlessness is a universal phenomenon, then why should its manifestation in the form of life remain confined to this one planet?

So if it is happening here, it cannot happen in isolation.

How can it happen?

Just like a drop in the ocean cannot exist in isolation and manifest something very, very different from the rest of the sea.

Is it possible?

Not at all.

Now to assume that we have life here on Earth only would be to assume that a drop can have an exclusive existence in an entire sea.

It just cannot.

So this is the same cosmic soup.

This is the same cosmic energy cascading around.

And if we have this type of life manifesting here, it's just like a drop in the cosmic sea.

So it must be happening somewhere else as well.

Yeah, that is possible that it might be happening in different ways, because we have this particular type of environment that has given rise to, incidentally, this form of life.

Some other planet in some other galaxy may be something similar, possibly, or very dissimilar, having completely different concepts of what it means to be aware of one's worth or one's life.

Maybe things are fundamentally different somewhere else.

And more sophistication would only mean that there will be zones of convergence between these distant manifestations of life.

And that itself will create more fronts for creating something completely different.

So perhaps this is the very nature of that cosmic restlessness I have been talking about. From the smallest organism struggling to survive to the most sophisticated intelligence reaching out into distant galaxies, it is the same mysterious tendency to go beyond what already exists.

The forms may change, the arenas may expand, but the churning continues.

And who knows what entirely new manifestations might emerge when these distant currents of the same cosmic sea finally meet?