The Old Moon and the Imperiled Landscape

It was very cold and the time was frozen around half an hour before the morning twilight on January 13, the day celebrated as Lohri; a day before Makar Sakranti on the full moon next day. The pallid rays of a pale moon had grown old so soon during the last hour before the morning twilight. The night had been chilly, clear-skied, frosty and fogless: an exceptional January night, not in chill, but in being clear certainly. The moon, just a day away from its fullness, had been exceptionally bright.

Nightlong, almost near the peak of its rounded beauty, it had fulfilled its luminous duty. Its milky beams over-rode the pointed shafts of light from the distant stars. After all it was his world; the stars had their own at mammoth astronomical distances. The moon was thus the brightest, bulbous star, eager to brush out every strain and tainting, shadowy tar. Its beams spread like snows over the sleeping horizons into the sleepy distances and languorous miles.

The beautiful countryside was lying in sleepy abundance under the chilly, milky blanket with slumberous pride. Everything was open to the celestial torch with nothing to hide. Cold-basking fields were huddled under their croppy sheets. Above was gloating the marvelous moonshine. Wheatlings stood bow-headed in reverence with dewy crowns fine. The marigold flowers were frozen in kissed silence by the milky showers. The flowers happy to surrender their colours to the lover’s mysterious smiles and disrobing powers. White pea flowers boasted their augmented whiteness. Aha, such dolefully beneficent had been the moony brightness. Even the trees did not appear merely dark specters lurking shadowishly over the horizon. They appeared boats of foliage floating in a misty sea.   

In the background of such a brightly lit stage even the sky seemed earth-lorn. Through the milky transparency, its bluish-dusky veil lurked and through it only the brightest stars smiled and showed that there was a world beyond as well. Scattered in the docile swathes of this moon-baked countryside, the villages seemed as mammoth ships silently floating in the white wavy sea of light.

At this moment the moon was well past its prime, as if in shining too bright, to use the full charms of a fog-free night, it had committed a harmless crime. Its setting quarters lay in the north-west, from where it was eager to move for some rest. Its strength and vigour had drastically plummeted down. Paleness eating into the guts of its plump milky brightness. An old, setting moon, away from the youth’s boon. Dislodged of its shiny crown, it ogled with a meek, even irritated, anguished, helpless frown. Its sheen was rapidly fading out. Its yellowish pale rays almost eager for a wailing shout. Glumly it was fading over that reddish-brown sandy undulation carrying fields, furrows and crops on its gently unfolding dome. The shiny fruits born of sweat-drenched hours by the farmers in its sandy loam. Accusingly the moon threw pale, protesting shadows in the south-east. There urbanism, consumerism and crass commercialism blatantly, proudly held its seat commanding metropolitan, capitalist feast.

The area had been earmarked for some development project. It now being defined by a tiny space bound in a map issued under the state government’s gazette notification. A mischief by the developmental hand. Ever eager to bulldoze over the nature and turn it into uncomplaining, lifeless sand where lustrous stones will be built over the nature’s burial. Heartless, wanton and depraved! But the nature has no oratory to baulk the words. It but repays in kind.

This pale, mournful moon was preparing to set soon into the misty gloom of the twilight. A new bright sun of consumerism and commerce will be ascending to its dawning height. And the soft natural delicacies will scamper with fright.

Those reed stalks which swayed to the cold shove of a gentle breeze without any greed appeared to say good-bye to the moon. The latter plummeted down further with a bloated face and a sigh. Its pallid face grimacing with a painful nostalgia. Its fading, setting rays tainted with a peculiar dullness, the death, the demise, the oblivion. Its oblong teary face looking down at the landscape. Sleepy fields, beneficent swathes of wastes and fallow lands.

Mighty lessons were taught here by nature to itself and all. The farmer going to the fields with his gear. Those long, painful and oftentimes fruitless days subsided when the sun’s eager rays looking at the sweaty trove and the shirt’s hoe. Where the long, brooding nights arrived like the deeds accomplished. Where the failures galore but the hard work was never a bore. The failures defined the success as the losses stood just as a testimony to the profits. Where the hopes, aspirations and desires varied with the changing hues of the weather. The farmers pawning everything for the feathers in destiny’s crown. Gold forming immaterially—or minimally at the rate of a dust speck for tons of sweat—in the toiled soil reddish brown.

All this will be gone. The moon was also dying with a moan. This charming mystery of the landscape: why hardest labour fetches minimal returns; why a bit less harder toil results in a soul-satisfying speckful of return that seems the wealthiest load. All these beautiful, aesthetic, curvy, circuiting strings, the mysteries of the landscape, of destiny, of the see-saw battle between happiness and suffering, between pleasure and pain, between penury and sustainable as well as gluttonous gain, between life and death, between a smile and a tear, all will be lost.

Everything will be gone for a direct, straight, materially penetrating needle of surety: the commercial, unflinching and fixed use of the landscape in a concrete form where profits will boomerang in proportion to the short-cuts; where compromised humanity, ideology and conscience will not face any ifs and buts; where there won’t be any sweet scent of labour which will be replaced by mechanical, greasy, muddy panting of merciless competition and mad grab; where concrete blocks and apartments will replace these wondrous solitudes and petalous platitudes basking in unrestrained, free, natural air; where sheaves, stalks, straw and reeds will not sway to the breeze, but blank, rigid, ironed towers will stand mutely, inflexibly to the nature’s cooing calls from increasing distances.

Now the sorrowfully yellowing death rattle of the setting time was arriving with a finishing chime. There on the opposite horizon, the day opened a window to sneak a peek at the imperiled room of the night. Wispily, there was the twilight with its mixed day-night delight. In its mysterious lap, the old moon met a slightly premature death, slumped as it feebly, freely into the silvery sea of the mist hung over the tree-line. Slithered it into the sea of death and plunged into invisibility.

The twilight mischievously winked with its unfaithful, teasing look, asking favours both from the night and the day. The old moon was gone with its last ray. And the soon-to-be-doomed panorama, unmindful of the fatality in wait, came out of its dewy slumber. A crane’s clarion call cree…ked over its yawning bosom. The sun prepared to cast its first ray. The fields got up for another hard farming day.

White blood and soldiers of peace

Please read this with a smile on your lips.

You may be in bad mood having argued with your husband or boyfriend. You may have been struggling to find the dress you are looking for in your messed up wardrobe. You might even be running around the house to meet multiple assignments to manage children and your presentation still not finalized. Wait, please do all this with a smile! It won’t disturb your schedule in any way. It’s a humble request like I ask you to take a harmless sip of water even if you don’t feel thirsty at the moment. A reasonless smile can be taken as simply as you merely take a sip of water.

Did it? Now please be honest and tell the relief it got you. A smile to the self, without any calculation, without any reason, without any expectance of results and rewards, miraculously makes you feel better. Instantly! Isn’t it wonderful? Do it and you know instantly what I mean. It’s like a corner of dark cloud on an overcast, freezing day parts and a life-soaked shaft of light falls over you, transporting you to blanketfuls of warmth and solace.         

Laughter is the best medicine, they say. Laugh to the capacity of your guts, but please don’t underestimate a smile. In strange ways it’s is therapeutic to the ever-wheezing, fretting and fuming brain machinery. It simply, without any exuberance and pretentions, releases tension and stress from the whirring machine that your brain is. It’s a coolant like you have in your car engine to stop it from burning red with fury.

Hush away your neutral face expression. Being expressionless is as good as bearing a wooden head. You can smile even when you don’t have to. It is contagious. Other cells in the body cascade down the message of well-being. It’s such a positive force. Smile is not just a cute expression around the lips of a cool person. It carries a healthy dose of happiness. Just curve your lips wherever you are right now, be it driving, walking back home after a stressful day in office, sitting alone in a cafeteria over a mug of coffee, jostling in a crowded metro, tucked in your bed, watching your favorite programme  on TV or talking to somebody. And you instantly get your medicine to be better. For free, girls! Grab it.

Quite wonderfully, you need not have a reason to smile. As the muscles around the corners of your lips get into an imperceptible crease taking your cheeks for a delicate contortion to make you look still better, you immediately feel a release of anxiety and stress from the heated chamber that our brain is. Simple fact is: when you smile, even when just doing it out of simple aloofness like somebody told you to have one more sip of water even if you aren’t thirsty, you let loose a healthy trail of endorphins into your blood. This chemical is a carrier of happiness. It’s as much potent, happy and healthy you feel while running.

If you carry the molecules of smile around your lips, it sends out positive vibes about your personality, that you are happy and firmly in saddle and in control of your life. It helps in interpersonal relations. It oils your professional pursuits. There are too many rivals in this unsparing competitive world. With a face inclined to smile, you will have some less rivals head-butting you in the game that life is. More importantly, every face in the world is incomplete without a smile. Even the most beautiful face can still go a notch higher with a smile.  

Ok, accepted that you are darn attractive and you take good care of yourself. You wear stylish clothes, have matte foundation, lip gloss and eye liner in the safest reach to support your charm. Wait, there is something freely available that can instantly take you to be the most adorable princess around. Just elongate your lips horizontally, very softly, allowing your cute cheeks to delicately undulate. It’s a smile lady! It’s the best tool on your dressing table. No beauty is perfect without a smile.

Apart from the glowing star that you become with a smile, the symbolic derivates are even more important. You look caring, empathetic, trustworthy, better leader, dependable companion and easy going. Apart from the glorious take-aways mentioned above, a smile increases white blood cells which make you stronger. Hidden inside your soft, considerate and caring persona topped with a smile, you become a strong and confident persona inside. A smile just digs the foundations of your firmness physically and mentally. It goes deeper and deeper.

Have a frown on your face and see the results. Even the liftman won’t salute with enthusiasm. Well before it oils someone’s insecurity, it harms your own system by increasing the toxics which generate stress and anxiety. With a smile you are more approachable and sociable. And opportunities have this tendency, like water has of flowing down to the lower levels, to rush after such persons.

The people in the world might be banging and clattering to beat and surpass each other for self aggrandizement. But still a cute soldier shielding his face with a smile instead of the iron mask of fretting rigidity and grimace is more welcome. This world will still be competitive but it won’t be a bloody fight and broken teeth and broken bonds. It will be a pleasant game. It will be beyond winning and losing. It will just be. Try this in office, at home, in trains. Just smile to yourself. Simple! It’s a cozy, comfortable bulb that you light up. After dispelling the gloom from some corner of your soul, it will spread into the shady zones into the beings of those around you. And they need it. This tiny flicker emanating from you can become a beacon of hope for someone who needs it.  

Forget the awkwardness and tension that strikes you due to the challenges thrown by situations. You might be waiting for your interview, your heart beating violently. You might be terribly inclined to lose it because the queue in bank isn’t moving. A frown will not make things go easy for you. But a smile can. Try this now. You will feel the effect.

For a change do something without any logic. Just smile!

Be a superwoman and world beater in your own ways

Don’t do everything just for money, rewards, recognition, name and fame. As we feel, most of our doings are just blind pursuits for something more important expected at the end of the doing. Doing thus becomes secondary, the outcome. The reward takes the centre stage, and everything before that turns a stale, perspiring, frustrating struggle. The process of doing becomes traumatic. By subjugating the process of doing to the unknown outcome in the future, we pawn the happiness and intrinsic satisfaction, which simply doing could have been, against the shifting, blinding mirage on the hot sands in future. Try to make doing primary. It’s like casting the chains away and lightens your burden. Not only it will light up your soul, the outcomes, whether you care about them or not, will just follow with a bang. If you do something just for some specific outcomes, it’s not doing, rather it’s some barter against the drops of your sweat. It’s labour, a menial work, mere slogging. You are not the master. Just try to do a few things without caring for the material and social rewards. You will know that you own the act of doing. It becomes pure and unadulterated. You own it and you are the master of it. Once you master something, given the potential human soul has, the byproducts will drop like sweat autumn windfalls, ripe, without any effort. That is the cascading effect pure doing does. There are hundreds of posts on this blog. I write not for viewership stats or adsense money. My reward is the numerous trophies I gather while simply writing. I write because I love doing it. There is no bigger reward than being able to do something you really love and like doing. A very small publisher trusts me and publishes my books. He likes my writing and invests some money to publish my books. I help him to the little extent that I don’t take any royalties. My books sell in just hundreds of copies, rarely touching the four figure mark. And even for that I don’t expect any royalty. Still I write for months to complete a book. Simple thing is I just love doing it. As I work on my books, without any restraints on publisher- and commerce-ordained limitations, I feel like flying in an open sky. It’s like being a painter having a completely empty canvas and possessing all the options to experiment with colours and shapes. This is what you get, the rewards, your breath of freedom, your space and your happiness. Every moment is like holding a big trophy. And believe me, if you immerse in doing something just for the sake of doing it to the core, you warp space-time continuum to the tune and frequency of your doing, and rewards follow, whether you accept these or not is another matter. Most importantly, the doings that bring instant soul-sweetening sense rarely give you money and material rewards. Helping a stranger, who has lost her wallet on a crowded platform, with a hundred rupee bill that can help her save hell lot of trouble; stopping to take an old hand and help him to cross the road; taking a stranded stray puppy out of the drain; a smile from an unknown face just because you did only this much to keep the elevator door open, helping her to catch onto the precious moment, etc., etc. The feeling you get instantly is sufficient to overpower any vanity of earning millions and getting gold medals. Most importantly, such small, small doings help you hone the humanity in you. Just like you pump iron in gym to harden your muscles, such little, little acts of just doing without expecting any rewards will hone the muscles of your conscience. Goodness can be practiced. It can be made a habit. Begin with such small things where your egoistic, self-driven work flow won’t revolt to begin with. Very soon you will turn out to be the best of a human being. And who is a good human being? Well, basically she is happy.

Cancer and Tumors in Earth

You run after a thing, struggle and toil for it to the chronic pain of your bones, and much deservedly you land up at the destination. You have achieved your thing. It’s the time to cherish its worth, its value for you. It’s time to celebrate and pause and allow the feeling to sink in. What value the victory carries if you cannot even spare the time and pause to allow the feeling seep into the perspiring pores of your skin, taking cool calmness reach to the limits of your soul. But it almost never happens. The pause, the rest is ever elusive. You achieve your target and the thing turns out to be valueless. The things, goals and destinations that you get and achieve and reach become almost valueless the moment you nail it. It’s always a struggle for the future. And it’s never living in the present. The dream value, which was earlier carried by the things and destinations where you stand now, shifts again to some another milestone in future. So again we drop our present and run after the future. The futile chase: the mirage keeps on shifting on the hot sands of our bloodied battle. And we run, madly, trampling the things and the moments which are the only possessions we have in reality and could have enjoyed, and rush for future, for things in mind, in the form of ever-escaping criteria of values, goals and destinations. No wonder, we never live our present by enjoying the victories and rewards our sweat has fetched us. We abandon the real rewards. We trample the true trophies of the present. You get the thing and it loses its value. No surprise that we feel so deprived, poor, cheated, underachieved and unhappy at the end of the journey when we fall. We hate any talk of pause in life. Little do we realize a restless run results in a fatigued, huffing fall at a time when legs cannot carry anymore and eyes fail and heart gives in. A run or a walk is well managed with intervals of pause and rest at the milestones we cross. It reinvigorates you for the next leg of the journey. Pause is blissful. It gives you the beautiful gift of accepting your present. A man, an animal, a vehicle, a civilization all need pause at intervals to maintain the journey, to save a fatigue and burnout. Unfortunately that is what we are not doing. Individually and collectively, we are headed down the precipice. The mad onslaught of modern civilization, with its plunder of natural resources and unchecked technological growth, needs a pause, for survival, for continuation of the journey. We are far advanced down the technological lane. Let’s pause now. First allow the horizontal spread of the utilities and benefits to the poorest of the poor. Let’s put a pause on population growth rates, exploitation of natural resources, scientific spurts and industrial productions. The modern civilization has gone too far with its unchecked growth. Unchecked growth is self-destructive. It’s nothing but cancer. The planet is carrying a cancer now. It needs to be checked. Let there be a pause, please. 

Roaming the planet to look for something which is safe in your pocket

Hi, this is somebody who has taken the quieter by-lane to be happy. The hustle and bustle of the big, booming main street is intimidating with the added risk that I may well forget myself after being lost in the crowd. As you walk in the crowd, the monotony and anonymity takes over. You lose the charm of life in doing the same things others are doing. You don’t feel the kick in solving the same problems using the same old, oft-repeated methods. The solutions also are boringly the same, the results also the same. And happiness ever looks at the farthest end of the planet or even beyond. The long and winding chains of the preconditions to be met, before you trudge nearer to the ever-elusive happiness, are spooling on and on: the dangerous mathematics of infinitely long factors and functions of happiness. I will be happy if I top, then you top, ok let me grab the best job, you get it, ok let me be the best CEO, you become one, then more. Then your children have to be the same or even more to take you to the still elusive dream of happiness. More money, more power, more prestige. Then there are others in the fray who can turn you unhappy even after you have overturned the records set out for yourself. There is no stopping. And hence no happiness. The problem is if your happiness is not within you from the beginning and lies at some goal-post in future at a distance, there are millions, trillions, zillions and even more open-ended factors that affect, mathematically scuttle your chances of a win. Forget it. It’s futile chase. The more we run after conditional happiness, the more we push it away from ourselves. The fundamental mistake is that we expect happiness to be the fruit on the tree of our efforts, i.e., the result, the fructification. No, it simply isn’t. It is the root of the tree of our endeavors, where we begin from, which lasts from the beginning to the end. If it’s not in the beginning, forget it, it won’t appear later. It has to be there before you begin. And the state of being happy can be habituated. Practice it as a daily routine, like you pump iron to tone your six and eight packs. Nurture the habit of just feeling happy, causeless and reasonless. Just smile when you are alone. Please try it and you will know what I mean. It lets loose a cascading effect driven by the hormones triggered by the movement of the muscles around the corner of your lips. Try it. Close your eyes and just smile. Unconditionally. You will feel how comforting it can be just to be happy. The fruits will follow later as you slog it out in the battlefield. It’s a simple verb, being so, a simple act, a solacing function. We but treat it as an intimidating noun in the future, interpolate it as success and achievements, the fruits at the end of the tunnel, the light at the end of the tunnel. It but is the lamp which is within you when you are in the dark. The path to happiness can never pass through the stages of unhappiness and struggle. It’s the present in continuation. Remove all future components from the equation of your happiness. So passing through the quieter by-lane, not stomped and nudged by the teeming crowds, I intend to reach a solitary path, laid out just for me, to reach my destiny, to be happy primarily, and enjoy the fruits of being happy.  All in all, I just practice the art of being happy unconditionally.