The Elixir of Life

A look of hate snatches and steals a part of life; a look of love adds something good to life. A hateful thought kills; a thought of love saves life. Hate is the evil collaborator of death; love is the bright-smiled custodian of life. Nurture the good and the best in you. Like most of the things it can be practiced and learnt. Practice smile. It’s a small pill of wellness. Learn to look at things with love. Start with your food, water, whatever you drink, or whatever you eat. Before you eat or drink, take a minute’s pause and look at the thing, the instrument of life, the helper of your survivability, the soldier of your life, resting before you on the table. It’s there for you, to help you get strong and survive and live another day. At that moment there is no better friend to you in the universe. Accept its friendship and brotherliness. Embrace its camaraderie. As you chew, swallow and gulp it down, it will become a part of you. It’s something that will be you once you have it in your guts. The moments before being eaten, it becomes a sacred part of your extended self. Accept it. Look with love. Take it as a blessing from your guardian angel to help you beat the negative forces hankering after your demise. The food taken with such love and affection becomes the elixir of life.

Dumplings on a rainy day

There is no absolute truth. All we have is just a pliant, relatively swaying sea of fractional truths. We draw out our suitable share of tit-bits of truths from this sea to complement our sense of identity with the self, i.e., ego, self-consciousness, our perception of the things, our vision of the world and the people around.   

  

Women are humanist!! Almost perfect except one thing! Their humaneness crosses the zone of perfection and slightly touches an arena where bitchiness for their own sex starts in free flow. It is here the man's chance to appease his women opens up its welcoming arms. A man has to realise that it is more practical to say a few negatively critical remark about other women than millions of appreciating words about his woman!!

Happiness is when everything is soaked in rain in the morning and the diligent boy hands you a copy of dry newspaper. You feel like proclaiming him a champion and yourself a lottery winner. You just grab your slightly damp copy--newsprint is so soft that it soaks some moisture from the air itself, so the delivery boy cannot help in this--like a prized possession. Life is not about mountains of mighty triumphs. It's about tiny molehills of such small pleasures. Learn to be happy with scores of little, little strokes of luck that come your way on a daily basis. Simple mathematics is: At the end of the day, the sum total of our little fractions of luck is more than the big shitty stroke of bad luck. Appreciate your tiny sinews of luck for they tie the rope of your survival and sustenance. If not for them things can go wrong in as many ways as the vastness of this universe.
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In the burning whirlpools of the desert storm, some tears shed by a suffering heart vaporize and go high in the sky for rainy prospects. Don’t get senty guys, it’s just an airy oasis.
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Don't take victory for granted. She is a very choosy bride. She has her own, sometimes illogical, criteria to pick up the groom.
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A nuclear bomb undoes all other types of technical superiority in conventional warfare. Similarly, leaps in space technology will see a country undoing various technical superiorities in the hands of rival countries on land.
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To escape boredom, a man has to just extend his normal schedule; the same extension, which overlaps a woman's effort to tide over her boredom, turns her into a sinner.
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The best compliment for my book Faceless Gods was by my friend's six-year-old daughter. 

Struggling to hold the fat book in her small hands, and lost in the dense text, she gave the expert review, "Uncle has got a very nice handwriting."
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Truth need not be salted. Even in its bland form, it's more vocal than any well-peppered, politically correct, hypothetically safe and socially convenient cuisine.
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Bigot, watch out, there is poison in your plate!

My dear terrorist, I have a very simple question for you. Why does killing come so easy to you? Each and every breath of a newborn is literally purchased by its parents and wards in lieu of love, affection and care which go beyond any monetary value. Why then you simply get ready to sniff out lives, the very same lives which have been taken care of tirelessly and unselfishly by parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, relatives and friends.

Killings in the name of religion is what defines we earthlings as of now. Quite surprisingly, the fundamental tenets of every religion aim to make the followers better human beings, better not just for the self, but for others as well. Religious texts seem imploring a person to become an instrument of betterment, a heaver of humanity forward on its march to better days. The core of all religions is meant to be love and compassion. Why then so much of hate and blood-bathing in the name of religion?

The walk between good and evil is very dodgy and testing. Like a rope-walker is inclined to fall, with each step it’s about evading the fall. There is a natural pull for the fall. Only with each careful step and awareness one can move on. Goodness requires practice. It doesn’t come naturally. Meanness has its own instinctive, convenient outlet through the little channels of ego pervading through our self-consciousness. Hate has its own natural pull. It just shoots off, gathering its own force once let loose, like a boulder rolling downhill. In hate you can do anything; it’s a terrific ignition. In anger you can rant endlessly.

In contrast, in love and peace you have few options. Love is going uphill. You have to hold it in your heart. You have to carry its weight. You pant and perspire. Man, it needs effort, simply because it doesn’t come naturally. Thousands of years of struggle to survive has genetically ingrained fear, insecurity and hate in the core of our being. Slightest trigger and the arrow is shot. Mention love and how many words you can speak out. Call of good deeds to be done around, you will twiddle your hair to find anything good to do around. Now mention hate, anger and destruction. And you have the options scattered around you to carry out ranging from verbally abusing somebody, slapping, screaming, breaking heads, throwing bricks to even killings.

Religion in practice is like the bamboo in the hands of a rope-walker. It is meant to stop the fall. It is supposed to prevent your fall with each step. It does so by making you aware of being good. So you take another step, then another and then another to complete the journey.

The religion in the hands of bigots doesn’t remain religion at all. It’s a poisoned pill. Condemn it in direct terms without fiddling with diplomatic maneuvering and falling in the clutches of impotent concept like secularism. Bigots are just simple mismanagers of religion. Throw them out of their authoritative seat. Hold them by their neck, kick them on their ass and spit on their version of religion that ordains killing innocent people. Not only they force a fall from the rope of life, they kill the soul. They kill the soul by sidelining love and replace it with hate. It imprisons the soul. It is skin deep addiction for some abnormal gratification of the sense. It pampers the evil side of the personality. There is always a choice to be either good or bad. It robs one of this natural choice. Only dark force with its ghosts of hate, jealousy, anger, insecurity and frustration remain in the fray. It grips you and makes you an instrument of the evil, a foot-soldier of chaos. You don’t see the light from within. You are a blinded, crazy robot, ready to strike. And when you strike you just kill, without bothering about who you are killing. They are mostly innocents.

When a child, who understands religion no more than the alphabets in her books, is killed in the unsparing spool of violence, what lines in the book of bigotry can justify the deed? When innocent people out for shopping, going to office and out there on the small stage of life get killed, which God in which heaven is appeased? If He is appeased, then to the hell with such a God!

Bound feet, mutilated genitalia and clipped wings

Women had to fight a long battle to reach the level of swimsuit and the leisure of swimming. Buried under multiple layers of yards of skirts, great-skirts, bonnets and gloves any attempt to lighten the burden was taken as a sign of doubtful morality. During the Victorian era, the swimwear was more cumbersome than what the modern woman wears in sub-zero temperatures. It was not until some decades back that female swimwear became something of a legitimate leisure activity. Mind you, the man had been doing the same since the conceiving of the so called civilization.

The most powerful country in the world, the United States of America, granted voting rights to the contributors of its development only in 1920. The first semblance of democracy dates back to ancient Greece. In England the roots date a good thousand years back. So the voting right came at least 1000 years late.

Men were flying planes for a good 30 years when the first females cracked the hard shell of cockpit glass and broke though rocky minds to set wings to the flight of their dreams.

Education and intellect, the timeless right of the men, let loose its first showers of knowledge and empowerment on women just during the last fifty years. The history of knowledge and its pursuit date back 3500 years. Even now it’s just in infancy in many parts of the world.

Female genital mutilation, removal of some or all of external genitalia, to tame the so called presumed rampant sexual desires in women. The sexual freedom that man enjoyed, taking it a moral act for him and immoral for her. It was his rightful pleasure and her sin. Now  the chains are breaking. A long battle to go for though, because sex for man is natural. For the woman it is still a scandal.   

In China, for one thousand years they bound women’s feet since early infancy with dozens of feet long strips of clothes to check feet growth. It was for the famed four inch feet, the symbol of docility, tameness and civility, of being gloriously feminine. They bent the toes inwards and tied layers of clothes to crush and break the bones slowly and painfully over the years to keep the feet from growing beyond four inches, the limit after which a woman became almost unacceptable and uncivilized and shameful. Women hopped like unassertive, vulnerable creatures. It was the walk of a willow switch swaying to spring breeze to arouse the men. They wore silken embroidered baby shoes over bound feet. Inside flesh rottened and sores festered. The famed Chinese beauty with bound feet of a baby did service to the patriarchy for 1000 years before the practice stopped in 1920s.

In my state of Haryana, we have 7000 village settlements. In my memory of the last 20 years, there have been 5 honor killings in my village. The girls’ crime was just as simple as pursuing--once in a lifetime--a freedom which any men or boy does every day throughout their lives. They fell in love. Nothing wrong with that. Everybody does. The only difference was that they allowed it to blossom. Survival and chastity meant subduing it the moment it sparked. Otherwise it was an unpardonable sin. The punishment death ordained by society and ignored and looked over by the state. Their sin? They went out with a boy, talked to him, went to some eating point with him, and thus brought this shame to the family. The society would expect hit-back from the disgraced family to salvage honor. And of course they did. A quiet strangulation, a still quieter cremation, and a quietest society. Gone. She earned it, everybody seemed to agree. Taking 5 honor killings per settlement during the last 20 years, the traditional society of Haryana has progressed with the killings of at least 35000 honor killings. Now when I see the freedom enjoyed by boys and girls, enjoying innocent pleasures like talking to each other, going for coffee and burgers and movies, I realize it has been a silent revolution. There are unnamed, unseen martyrs. I count them to be 35000 in my state during the last two decades.

The bloody wheels of exploitation are taking women further to the next milestone in their journey.          

As the human juggernaut moves from brawn to brain, there is an inevitable shift in gender roles. The traditional muscle-dominated bastion of males is melting. It’s more about smartness and management now wherein females are better placed to excel given centuries of biological traits sharpened in managing things despite greatest odds.  

All things go in circles. In the beastly fight to survive in the jungles, we started with an all male dominated scenario. Now we are moving towards parity and equality in gender functions in making a society and driving the economy and pulling the technology. On further progression on the path in the circle, the role of women will overtake that of men. And rightly so. They have earned it. It has been a bloody battle for thousands of years.

Harmless hornets, biteless bees and beggar peacock

Large yellow paper wasps, one of the stinging hornets, defended their nests with a single-minded determination. Stinging winged chivalry! Attack! Their primal instinct! Well that was almost three decades back when we ran helter-skelter as the winged yellow striker, twitched its antenna, its dull black points of eyes stared before striking. Children cried with pain. Next day a joker with a swollen face would provide free entertainment.

So much so for the wild instinct! There were still remaining some traces of wilderness in the countryside. Wild is what? It’s just to be natural. But then having turned the wilderness upside down, trading it with the civilized onslaught, we humans are restlessly marching ahead. There is a stampede and many species are getting trampled in the dust below. The wilderness gone. Most of the species have lost their footing as the terribly over-bloated and glutinous super-species, man and womankind, firmly hold the reins of the chariot of nature. Everything has changed. The wilderness vanishing, so is the mundane ‘wild’ streak in birds, animals and insects. It’s a tamed world in tamed humanized environs.

Coming back to the yellow foe of our childhood. They held their positions, defended their share in nature, struck lips, cheek, nose and forehead to defend their fortifications. The punished swollen face of the linage of Homo sapiens bearing a testimony to the fact that he is not the only claimant to the cakes of Mother Nature. Things have come upside down since then. As the human juggernaut moves on, mowing down the last traces of wilderness, species are losing their primal instincts, just to buy some more time before the inevitable extinction. It’s an acceptance, a sort of death-bed time’s letting go of any signs of further struggle. A final surrender, a soulful resignation.

The yellow hornet doesn’t bite now. Somehow stealing out some niche in the not so impressive corner of the house, where they are not a blot on the household decorum, surviving there like some beggar on the pavement, they simply don’t bite. The sentinels don’t rush at your nose even when you raise a cobweb cleaner in the nest’s direction. The instinct of survival seems to have taught them a lesson that they cannot afford to mess with the bi-pedaled torch-bearer of the onslaught on nature.

I commit the error of still linking honeybees to the notorious chivalry of those comb-defenders we witnessed during childhood. They don’t bite anymore. Forget about flowers, they have to run greedily for the semi-arid shoots of acacia. It’s scorching heat and honeybees buzz around the water bucket. It’s man’s offering. It’s no wild stream bordered with wild flowers where they can lay claim their share of nature and defend their fort. The bucket is man’s creation. So they don’t bite. They sense that it’s man’s beneficence and kindness that they are still surviving. I put my hand among a swarmful of honeybees stuck up around the corners of the bucket. Nostalgia strikes. I still remember those bites and swollen limbs. Well that is history. They just fly away. In a struggle to grab the last survival sips in a world that has no place for them anymore, they have forgotten to strike. The confidence is gone. They don’t have any rights anymore. That’s what happens when you just survive and not live. Only woman and mankind are living, others are just surviving. They will definitely become extinct. Then it will the human’s time to struggle, survive and get extinct. (Before that of course humans will desperately try to artificially replace whatever nature, in combination with countless other species, has bestowed them with. The stage is getting set for the evolution of a new species—some unthinkable woman-machine combination.)

The peacock, a riot of colours, is in double mind. With its cute eyes it stares at me. The wilderness in it is admonishing of a danger. It takes a step back. But where can it to fly back to. It’s a migrant in the village. The countryside is saturated with insectsides and pest control chemicals. So there is nothing for it to feed upon there. I understand its helplessness. So take some more steps forward with chapatti pieces in my hand. I know it’s hungry. It won’t fly away. The peacock has accepted its fate and so have all others. Except humans, of course.