A Petalous Reprimand

Hi, I’m Jasmine, a little flower in a tiny garden in a modest house. I have a message to pass. Or do you think I smile for nothing? I have a sweetly whispering tales to tell! Or do you think I have such nice scent in my petals for nothing? But sweet tales are of no use these days; even children are being taught to be rugged puppeteers to create their own unique miracles. So I would, for the time being, prefer to invidiously yawning message. These are not my own reflections, these are inspired by a dew drowsed rose last night, an old one, who ruffled his old petals to unfurl the tale of mankind’s doomed destiny. 
The summer has fire in its heart-kiln. Hottest dusty winds swerve and swirl with an all-consuming passion. Temperature creeps like a restless climber to boil all and everything. The sun shoots off billowing streams of sorrowful rays to soak the last ounce of moisture to appease his current mistress, the unsparing summer. The weather’s torturing squeals tame even a bull that pants with thirsty foam on the muzzle.
I know Corona has had full-fledged orgy leaving you guys caught in devilish bewilderment. I but have the indefatigable and irrepressible grain of the Holy Spirit. It still lies at my petalous core because I have retained some room for it to keep it thriving, unlike you guys who have stuffed yours to the gills. The grain of Holy Spirit stands firmly forthright. Otherwise why would I smile with a spirit so deeply exuberant? I am not bothered much about the nightmarish twists and angry shoves of the noon-time hot wind that builds up with a barraging crescendo.
Amidst all this groaning commotion, I stay unmindful of the garish and grotesque, and always stay mindful of the opulent aura and nostalgic contours of the fresh sips of early morning cool breeze. It caresses me with luxurious swags. I have a single-pointed—unlike the multi-pronged memory of yours—sharp memory that helps me recall all treasure of my good fate, while the testing noontime passes over my petals with a gibberish squelch. Unfavorable time with its tendency of criminal confiscation can’t erase the songs in my heart which the cool early morning etches on me with its hurryless, sweetly crawling pen.
You may have an eternally rampaging brain, but where is that eternal equanimity of the soul which even a tiny flower like me is blessed with? You are firmly in the grip of the riotous renaissance of your passions, but do you have the time even to get a genuine spiritually suffused and nectar-imbibed smile like I possess? Your rapier sharp reflexes, born of your insecurities, have turned you the ruling supernovas of the earth. But restless journeyman, mind thy faltering strides and the fanatic noose hanging down the line as a kind of primordial penalty for rising too high and sinking too low at the same time to be the ugly emissary of some evil, spurious speedster. Take care, thy condemnatory encroachment is continually coiling around your own self.
You guys are superbly theatrical with your eloquent arguments. You are energetically resourceful and proclaim your resounding resourcefulness. But can you even smile with this feeling that you are light-headed and unburdened of some insurmountable restlessness? Can you ever be free of the guilt about the longly repressed real self? Isn’t all your so called growth and development a mere flailing of arms at the unbreakable bars of the perpetual prison?
You are everything and I am nothing. I am a tiny speck of formless and relationless love. I have the golden reminiscences of the slow-moving remotest wilds. I smile fulsomely beyond the teasing tussles of the cringing anarchist who is foredoomed to end in the failure’s meat grinder because he churns his own ill-fate by pulling strings this way and that way to break everything in two, in pleasure pain, light dark, love hate, etc., etc.
I am deep in the docile domesticity of just being as I am; pulsating dynamics of the eternal light flood through my petals. With your copious consumption and arrogant aloofness, you loop around your desires’ dragnet and kill the spirit of the forests. ‘Animism!’ I coo even at my modest most enthusiasm. ‘Humanism!’ is all you can manage even at your best. My worst is still better than your best. Engaged in your piercingly protracted struggle, you may proclaim self-righteousness in your own courts, but in the eyes of the supreme colorist, you are nothing more than a perilous pimp of criminality. Your self-created Gods and Goddesses are nothing more than goblins and elves of fairy tales.
With my silent spiritual reflections, beyond the drag of expectations egging one to write permanent lines on the shifting sands of time, I enjoy the flourishing inspiration of my soul. And sorry, I turned condemnatory like you guys for some time! Now forgive me and inhale the olfactory nectar that I offer in full humility!

Self-preserving Creepers

Covid numbers seem to be losing their relevance as we get onto the usual mode. Forgetfulness is the mother potion of survival and sustenance. Memory is merely a convenience. We don’t basically survive because we can remember the good; we survive because we have the capacity to forget the bad. We overcome the deaths of near and dear ones and cross over grieving traumas. Animals forget far too soon and hence they may have the physiological pain, they hardly suffer. Plants and need not even feel that instantaneous pain. That is almost unadulterated consciousness. We have a relatively longer span of carrying our pains in memory and hence suffer. But when it comes to moving on, nature has given us enough capacity to get into the whirlpool of survival once again.

So despite 6.5 million Corona cases, and still rising rapidly, and 400,000 deaths world over, other words, issues and phrases are toppling Corona from its few-month old chartbusting reign. India swiftly crossed 200,000 cases without making much of scary hoopla about it. Earlier, as we touched 100,000 mark, a massive wave of panic got built up casting gloom over the entire country. However, with recovery rate almost 50% people seem to have taken it as any other illness causing discomfort and even death. Soon it will be business as usual. For a while, it appeared all of us have learnt pervasive, lasting lessons to redirect our manners in more sustainable ways. The pause was forced. However, with the whirlwinds of modern life picking up again, leaving everyone hurrying and scurrying again, the lessons are already tossed to the winds. Those lessons actually sound too poetic, artistic, aesthetic and impractical and hence valueless. I am sure, despite terrible losses, it will be the business as usual very soon.

In America, Corona got dislodged by a nasty racist incident. Forget about Corona and the USA—China feud building up, the lethal virus of hate and insensitivity in one policeman has unleashed something similar to the Corona mutant entering the human body and wreak havoc. Malice, hate and anger in minds are as lethal as Corona. The virus of hate, lying in incubation in the human mind for long, was incubated during those tragic 9 minutes as the white empowered policeman sat with his knee forced upon a helplessly face-downed man of color, the latter forcing muffled sounds ‘I can’t breathe!’ The policeman was forcing his duty beyond any kind of legitimacy. The poor disadvantaged man of color was losing whatever little he had, his life basically. The man dies and riots, arson and plunder get unleashed across America. When one wrong triggers a wave, many wrongs emerge at various fronts, muddling up the situation where right and wrong lose their meaning altogether. A cornered China gets a chance to hit a few punches in return. New spots always put the older ones in background. All we can do is to retain lessons, but given our great faculty of forgetting we lose the thread and the new pages of resolutions get lost to the heaving huffs of winds.  

Creeping civilization! To be an ultramodern successful creeper, we usually use our tendrils like tentacles to reach the wall of our goals. Our tendrils and tentacles latch onto the softest sinews, even if that means killing and suffocating the tiny offshoot that needs help and support itself, on the way to hit our post. Sometimes I think, after witnessing the rawest elements of nature, this creation is imbued with self interest, and our pretty human selfishness is just a portion of the infinite force of self-preservation that we see around. What do you think?    

What is Good and what is Evil? Good means God to most of us. I want to love God. To love my God, I, but, have to hate Evil. I love wanting God, even though I know wanting in excess is always bad even if it is about God. I love God, but to love God, i.e., good, I have to hate Evil, i.e., bad. I want God. I prioritize my want to be good over all other states despite numerous pulls in the opposite directions on the practical stage of life.

Why do I have the need to love God? And to sustain all this, I need the anti-god in me. I love the anti-god in me, other why would I retain in me to nurture the sense of good. I need hate to keep reminding me that there is a thing called love. I need my devil to love my god. We always need the unrighteous polarities to keep our dreams of wanting to love pious polarities. Words simply flummox me, eh. I get caught. And then I throw stones at the devil to keep my urge to throw flowers at my God. Little do I realize that my pious hymns need my hateful hiss at my sins to glorify them as some godly divinity.

Puzzling words, always failing to convey the ‘real’, leaving the expression incomplete! Was there any perfectly complete sentence that carried the sense of expression to the ultimate? We should feel that it's about 'experiencing' life, not just 'knowing' it. We know too much, and knowing is just on the surface, leaving up bobbing restlessly like fishermen’s net-line floaters.

To feel we have to dive into the depths and forget. Let’s hone the art of forgetting to take huge bites at our sense of ego, and become a sort of self-eating shark. It will help us sink to the bottom of experiential embrace, a kind of amazing restfulness. When I get such experiential embrace by mother existence, a mammoth mountain, a huge panorama, a little flower all acquire same beauty and significance irrespective of their size. The moment overpowers the senses and gives a sweeping feeling as if there is nothing more to know, a sort of Samadhi.

Self-preservation

Creeping civilization! To be an ultramodern successful creeper, we usually use our tendrils like tentacles to reach the wall of our goals. Our tendrils and tentacles latch onto the softest sinews, even if that means killing and suffocating the tiny offshoot that needs help and support itself, on the way to hit our post. Sometimes I think, after witnessing the rawest elements of nature, this creation is imbued with self interest, and our pretty human selfishness is just a portion of the infinite force of self-preservation that we see around. What do you think?

Sage Dostoevsky and God

Sage Dostoevsky speaks about the idea of God:

“The mere fact of the ever present idea that there exists something infinitely more just and more happy than I am fills me through and through with tender ecstasy — and glorifies me — oh, whoever I may be, whatever I have done! What is far more essential for man than personal happiness is to know and to believe at every instant that there is somewhere a perfect and serene happiness for all men and for everything. . . . The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living and will die of despair. The Infinite and the Eternal are as essential for man as the little planet on which he dwells. My friends, all, all: hail to the Great Idea! The Eternal, Infinite Idea! It is essential to every man, whoever he may be, to bow down before what is the Great Idea. Even the stupidest man needs something great... They don’t know, they don’t know that that same Eternal, Grand Idea lies in them all."___ Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Start of Unblock Series

There isn’t enough steam left in the tottering economy to go for another costly blockbuster sequel, Lockdown 5.0. So for economic redemption, they are going for Unlock series. Phase one of Unlock gets on the way from June 1. The soldiers will come out of the trench, cautiously avoiding the Corona booby-traps, looking this way and that way like a scared hare lest the sniper shot travels through the hurts, lungs rater because the Corona bullet slays lungs primarily. One cannot win a war by forever hiding in the trenches. Living itself means taking calculated risks.

The market in the town appears shaken terribly like broken palm fronds on a cyclone struck coast. It will take hell lot of courage on the part of even the most money-crazy trader to come out of the trench and start with the same relish for money, especially when people run to wash hands after touching currency like it’s a sin. It will surely take a few months for things to get normal. The train has been completely derailed. It ran too fast and for too long. Nature intervenes to insert pause.

Dostoevsky: “Stupidity is of as much service to humanity as the loftiest genius.” We have lost the trail of our glorious stupidity while imprisoned at homes. The driving force of our civilization, our fabulous puzzlement of stupidities has paused and so has the chugging, huffing, steam-spewing engine of progress and development. This mad rush defines our being alive. Without it we hardly appear like human beings. We look more miserable without our miserable rut of life. A sort of addiction we have!  

Political croaking is swiftly overtaking the Corona chorus in media now. Well, it reminds me of a particular political system. Which political system do you think is inherently the enemy of true life and living? Some clues to the answer: they are the sworn enemies of freedom and individuality; they are the rascally advocates of a glorified mediocrity; propagators of an abominable shallowness; and the dark Angels of some grossly hypothetical equality minus individual freedom and dignity.

Tell friends, tell! I hope most of you have guessed it right. They prune the roots of individuality like one does with the potted oaks. The roots are repeatedly cut to keep the bonsai alive, stunted, well below the full blossoming mark to avail a subservient species. Communism does the same.

The population in China is QR-coded like they are lifeless products stuffed in a swanky mall. This kind of digital surveillance allows the authorities to scan each and every aspect of the citizens’ lives such as where did they go, which transport they used, what they wore, what they ate, with whom they did go, how much they spent, etc., etc.

All US—the land of individual assertion to optimize the full potential—needs to take an edge in the cute war is to puncture Huawei’s tentacles over the global communication network. The speed of the red car will slow down with one main wheel getting punctured. Keep your missiles safe and fire phrases like Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, human rights, Uyghur Muslims, Panchen Lama to name a few. A political system strictly defined by the sanctified lines in the red book gets terribly ruffled by disturbing phrases which appear sacrilegious to the biggest hypothetical dream trapped in the tiny funny book.   

Ruskin Bond says, “To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beast.” How will such stunted spirits laugh? In gross standardization for the base level cut down equality, how will mercy survive as an emotion? Mercy thrives in an environment of freedom. Ever-watchful state system might create material prosperity but it quashes the spirit and breeds misery of the spirit. And miserable spirits hardly can be merciful. Does it mean communism is basically to dehumanize people, to make them nearer to animals than what we know ourselves as Homo sapiens?

Ruskin Bond: "It's unlucky to call a tiger a tiger. My father always told me so. But if you meet a tiger, and call him uncle, he will leave you alone."

Well, given the arrogance and attitude of all and sundry that I see around, everyone should be addressed as "uncle" by me. I find them adorned with the majestic pride of a tiger. But problem arises with men in late thirties and early forties. They are the real claimants of the title of uncle, but the moment I address them as uncle, I mean tiger, they turn a rampaging bull, ready to trample me to death.

Corona you may keep spreading the guttery stench, I have feathered fragrance. An emotion can be far stronger than tons of muscles and physicality. Spreading the fragrance and colors of the land of paradise amidst the burning plains of North India, Kashmiri Gulab! It has delicious smell and its pink color and paradisiacal smell outshine the deadliest blaze of summer sun.

The Juggernaut of Corona has left soot, saplings, plants and trees trampled all along the way. We cry over the loss of mainstream trees and crops. There are wayside weeds also that might be inconsequential from the point of view of our economy, but for Mother Nature they are as good as any high value cash crop. In the mainstream demography, the stateless citizens, the wandering nomads, are like wayside worthless weeds. They too have their share of loss, just that their loss is almost no loss on the economic scale.  

Out of movement, out of petty trade, out of steam, the gypsy caravan is stuck up at a place for the last 3 months. Of all other deprivation and drudgery, they sorely miss their only right, the right to move. These are the intangible losses that would never be counted among the category of Corona losses by the mainstream society.

In 500 years since they took a vow never to settle down at one place after their leader Maharana Pratap lost to Akbar, these nomadic iron smith tribals have moved on the fringes of the mainstream society. They didn't compromise with their freedom and said a firm no to Akbar's offer of a settlement. Meanwhile, modern civilization contrived rockets. As change is inevitable, the gypsy rate of change is pleasantly swooning. The ornate, wooden ox cart is now being slowly replaced by the bike rikshaw. The jostling civilization scattered around is pushing and prodding them a bit harder to force them to move faster on their endless path.

Nearby, the sunshine gets strangulated and caught in high-tension electricity wires and mammoth metallic banyans supporting them to pin a hole in the skies, the wings of these free birds catch fire and they try to fly away and drop one by one.

The nomadic cattle herders who wander around with their hundreds of famished, huge-horned, bony cows now set out with tottering steps like the creaking water wheel over a dry well. How did they even survive while no movement was allowed? The cows scraped dry grass out of dust on a wasteland. Their dung lies littered like jackals poop, so small and miserable. The herder has a flaming red huge headgear, almost a crown of thorn. His gypsy shirt tightly squeezes his slim torso and the windblown dhoti sways like the torn, raggish pal on a lost ship. There they go escaping the desert sands, the nomadic herders from Rajasthan. Dust here means better pastures to them. How I wish we get used to be contented with what we have!

There has been torrential rain quite unexpected for the season bringing down the temperature to 30 maximum from 46. The honeybees take rest from their death-defying attempt at fetching water to cool the hives. Mother Nature has spewed enough water for two days at least. So they don’t return just out of habit. Theirs is a world that is strictly defined by basic needs. We humans nurture habits out of basic needs, which quickly leads to our typical greed. 

In the forest a honey badger is devilishly tenacious. An elephant may surely crush it like an ant, but the little stubborn rascal will stand on its way till the last breath. A jackal flip-flops among cowardice, caution and cunningness. Two extreme characteristics in two species. They test their skills in the game of rope pulling. Unluckily for the poor python, there was no rope in the forest for the contestants. So they used a python instead! As a common man I feel like being pulled in all directions by the smarter species. Poor migrant workers returning on foot on their hundreds of miles long march of misery is the mammoth, fat python that is now being pulled and hunted by the political hunters to get bellyfuls of political pie.

In a tribal hamlet in Gujarat, far away from the maddening crowd and its still madder Corona offshoots, an old tribal woman drags a huge Kobra. A jittery forest official is lucky to shoot the scene on his mobile. She holds it inconsequentially like it’s a junk piece to be dragged out of the habitation. She walks like performing daily chores, holding the poor devil by tail, the latter clueless about what to do and what not. She drags it across the street without even looking behind. The deadly snake throws its hood in desperation along the crowd. She then simply throws it away like an unwanted unusable piece of old rope. The toothless wisdom of a grand-mom: A rope and a cobra are the same as long as your fingers don't discriminate between the two while holding!

Since the start of the Lockdown blockbuster series, there have been 5 occasions when mild earthquake tremors hit the Delhi NCR. Corona forces us to stay inside the box, and mother earth then shakes it to see us toppling out like scared mice. Five mild tremors in such short time doesn’t portend well. Geologically it may mean a big earthquake is waiting in the wings in the area. Moreover, crores of locusts are hovering in the northern skies like the nefarious enemy drones to chuck out crops. God knows what else this 2020 has in its store to stump us!