Shaping the wooden crate of my destiny

He was busy hammering the wood. Tonk, tonk, phutt, phutt, buuum, buuum. Lot of noise. I was crying foul. He Himself winced with unbearable pain as I cried foul and blamed Him for being so merciless and unkind. God but was doing His duty. He has to have smile and the tears in each of His hands, for they lose their meaning in the absence of each other. It’s all blame game on Him and little appreciation. God was putting down nails into my wooden being to shape the box of my destiny. I am an undefined dead wood with His woodwork. Making is painful and laborious. It’s not a cakewalk. So I kept on crying with pain and cursed Him for his mercilessness. Making is a highly painful buddy. It draws blood and fetches tears and remorse even in His heart for being so accepting to the painful side of existence. He but cannot remove pain from universe because then pleasure will lose its meaning.  He cannot chuck out darkness, for light will become meaningless. But believe me every nail writes the script of many-many pleasant moments in future. Love your struggle. Accept your pains. Be a bit kind to yourself when you fail. Only a fall carries the full measure of a rise. See through your tears at the impending victory waiting at a distance. Love your labour on the hot sands of your destiny because these are the milestones which will define and make your victory meaningful and worth it.

Killing with one hand, saving with the other

How precious is a new-born life! It’s more precious than anything else on the earth. You cannot find anything to weigh equal in the opposite pan. Nothing matters more than the survival of a new-born. It becomes the primary cause. You become its sky and earth, sheltering this water bubble to keep its shiny film of time-dome reflecting in your eyes. There it merges with your dreams and your dreams rush out into the broad daylight to shake hands with your destiny. You cup your hands over it to save its feeble light from going off even by the slightest whiff of air. Look at the way the little signs of life in a just born, so fragile, weak and soft, are picked up and held to heart with so much love, care and affection! You hold the tiny seed, so small that it can be blown away by a little whish of air from the mouth, and see it growing into a big banyan. It becomes larger and more important than you, nourished by the dewy showers of your heart, honey-sweet sips of your emotions and defended by the ramparts of your protectiveness. A new-born clings to survival like it is held to life just by an invisible string of a cobweb, which may snap at the slightest carelessness. So we dreamily hold dear life like dreams spread on our eyelashes. It’s our own image we hold, our chance to survive in the future, a continuation of our journey, a furtherance of our hopes, aspirations, passions and the culmination of all our struggles. It’s a reward for all our perspiring work. It’s the medicine for all the ailments which plague us. A child, a new life, is a symbol of our belief in the freshness and meaningfulness of the journey, the great art of doing, of making, the story of continuing the march. That’s how we nurture a new life. If not for this instinct, no child will ever survive. After all, it’s such a tiny lamp and the storms are so strong. Why is it that once that very life grows up, we grow so apathetic to it that its decimation and destruction hardly counts as anything more than a routine news item? Why killing becomes more expected and natural than saving lives? Why are there more people ready to kill, than eager to save lives? It’s the futile game of doing and undoing. Just making and then breaking. It’s the mad, crazy force that has kept us to the level of mere struggling pack of humans who are as miserable like they were thousands of years ago. It is the bondage that holds us back, stopping us from becoming superhuman, which was otherwise our destination given the beginning we had in the loveable most and caring hands. But we first do and then undo. The nasty cycle of creating and destroying. A part of us is making, and the majority is involved in destroying. And we remain where we started from. We nurture new life like the dearest jewel to the self, and then we get busy in the mad frenzy to kill and destroy those very dear lives. It’s self annihilation. It’s like raising crops with all the care and then cut, reap and harvest.   

Laugh at the load on your head

When life screws you up from many angles, and despite best of your efforts, and all the humanly possible tries, you find the situation unchanging, you can still fight for a change! The ray of light is never lost. It lurks somewhere. All you need is to look earnestly. And there is a very easy solution. All it requires is a change in yourself, the carrier of all this unjustified shitty load! You can make yourself physically stronger. In plain and simple terms, physically stronger. If the load carrier becomes stronger, the load becomes lighter. It is like a person suffering under 100 kg weight. And come whatever may, he cannot unburden himself of this load. What is the option left? It is just to get physically stronger so that it is possible to carry this load. I’m talking of plain physical strength! Forget about all other hypothetical versions of strength like mental strength and all, these are just derivatives of the basic skeleton of our body. Physical strength is the prelude to all other concepts of strength. So all you guys and girls, who are undeservedly carrying extra load in life, and cannot put it off your head, just sweat it out. Grow strong physically for your load! Then you can even laugh at the weight on your head!

Why do I want to read The Satanic Verses and Reminiscences from the Nehru Era?

The day when I would feel completely free, being totally satisfied with the Indian democracy, will be when I will enter a bookstore, go to the display to pick up The Satanic Verses and Reminiscences from the Nehru Era, walk out proudly and safely, openly flaunting my right to knowledge and information, reach my study and immerse myself in these books, share the experience with others later, and still be safe over a cup of coffee at a public place. This, to me, is the hallmark of a vibrant democracy and an open society. It’s not that I’m a scandal-monger or somebody interested in pickled sweet-sour version of things and people. I’m just curious like children are about a world far bigger than their understanding and imagination. I just want an opportunity to peel off the mask and look at the dermis to know a bit more interesting, meaningful things below the epidermis. The things that are routine and popular and are sort of conventional come along a well-contrived effort by individuals, teams and organizations in building up that particular image. It’s about personas, organizations and religions. I want The Satanic Verses to be available at all bookstores in India. Not that I am speaking as a Hindu rightist or somebody suffering from Islamophobia. I respect Islam as much as I do my own religion, or for that matter any religion on the planet. But beyond divinity and messenger of God, I want to know the role of humans in shaping a particular belief system. The Satanic Verses takes you to the life and times when Islam originated. The very same applies to Reminiscences from the Nehru Era. I’m not interested in the colorful lives of the King and Queen of free India. But by having a craving for the real behind the scene lives of Nehru and Indira, I want to see how much of ourselves, we the common Indians, gets reflected on the ones who led us for so many years. During these days of free speech and information, I am just eager to use my right to information and mischievously peek behind the curtains to see how the mighty people drop their guards to be humans like us. Those escapades and naughty surrenders to the basic instinct certainly leave me water-mouthed.

Fire-pitted souls

This one is for those who daily put their physical selves in the furnace to earn survival morsels--the laborers, peasants, daily wage earners, artisans, roadside vendors, etc. Their whole body sheds sweaty tears day in and day out. So the salty sea of miseries pours out through the thick walls of their rough skin. It rarely finds an outlet through eyes! Why? Because these are glassy hard balls--the fiery pits where dreams, tears, hopes and humanity get burnt incessantly! Hunger always staring in the face. Most of the common realities just wildest dreams. Every walk a struggle to survive. Every smile just a shadow of pain. A wish to earn an extra penny in whatever you do, think, say or plan. There is no respite. Hunger becomes your shadow, always with you, your companion. After a time you become used to it, get addicted to it. The starving shadow becomes the self. You love it more than even the self. The personality becomes a hard-knotted dead wood. A dark hole which sucks its own light. A vacuum which sucks in air. A life that eats itself to appear more like death. An emptiness that chucks away any space needed for a normal self. Yaa, poverty makes one almost sub-human, a different species. Is one life-time sufficient to escape its clutches? You become a brute like the bull snorting, pulling the cart, staring on the road, tearing the hooves, taking one step after the other. You cannot look up and see this wide, spacious world. Your vision is limited to the grains in the sands around your feet which you have to pick up and eat to survive another day. There was no past, just like there is no present, and exactly like there will be no future. Well, where to go and what to do!?