The posts on this blog deal with common people who try to stand proud in front of their own conscience. The rest of the life's tale naturally follows from this point. It's intended to be a joy-maker, helping the reader to see the beauty underlying everyone and everything. Copyright © Sandeep Dahiya. All Rights Reserved for all posts on this blog. No part of this blog may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author of this blog.
A continuous run is no fun without rest, repose and pause. Inviting you to slow down and have a bit of rest...fast mode has no meaning without the slow mode. A run is fruitless without rest. In any case we have to stop to reap the rewards of our running, huffing and puffing...
If one fish can spoil the entire pond, can a single lotus do the same from the side of beauty? Well, it serves a big purpose if we believe so. Let’s believe that an ounce of goodness is enough to counterbalance tons of evil. This belief itself serves a big purpose. It keeps the hope alive for love, joy and compassion.
**
It is so easy to react on impulse to the instincts driven by
hate and revenge, and so difficult to postpone the very same, think coolly, and
take calculated measures and respond. Our success and standing in life is
decided by the time gap between raw impulse and cool deliberation. As we move
towards lessening this gap we take a firmer grip on the wheel of life. There
comes a time when impulsive reaction and cool deliberation merge into one. Then
you are in the driving seat and this mind your servant. In that position, you
create, you become a creator. You are no longer a piece of mere creation.
**
A stray puppy licked my hands...its tiny tail wagging with loads
of greetings. It was so friendly, so pure and honest. The puppy feels far more
loving than so many smart humans having super-egos who just love to hiss and
bite...hiss and bite....hiss and bite!
**
Dark is the poor sidekick of light. It just exists to
provide a canvas on which the multihued colors of light get painted in dazzling
arrays and patterns.
**
The archetypal distressed genius, Maradona, who wrote the shimmering lines of his life with his left foot (and left hand), died on November 25 at the age of 60. He always courted skirmishes on and off the field. Beginning as a cheeky burglar involved in daylight robbery, the destiny catapulted him to become the audacious marauder playing tricks with feigns, passing steps and acceleration and stops and side turns. It flummoxed the opponents.
He had a tendency to steer around the normal as much
as he veered around the defenders. To him the world itself looked like he was
in a stadium, sidestepping over social norms and sometimes even the law. No
wonder, he remained a pleasant, unbridled, obese trickster even long after he hang
his boots. An unfettered and effervescent spirit, we may say.
The stocky paragon of Argentina pride inspired a
fierce devotion. To the millions of his followers, it was a quasi-religious
experience. You could love him or hate him, but you couldn’t ignore him. His
innings on this planet has turned out to be a eulogy to a life in tantalizing excess
ranging from superstardom to drugs to domestic abuse to guns to cocaine to
involvement with organized crime: A lotus out of the muddled tumult of muddy
waters. Or we can say, it was an awe-inspiring darkness coupled with the silver-lining
of his genius.
He flirted with football with an impetuous cunningness.
Moderation and discipline wasn’t in his dictionary for it was a testimony to
excess in all he did and thought. A banner sums it up: ‘It does not matter what
you have done with your life, it matters what you have done with our lives.’ He
was indeed a heady rock star who commanded the stage.
‘I am Maradona, who makes goals, who makes mistakes.
I can take it all, I have shoulders big enough to fight with everybody…’ He
gave enough credit to his vaunting words through his Aztecan sorcery with
football at the Mexico stadium.
From winning the 1986 world cup indisputably single
handedly to be unceremoniously kicked out of the 1994 event on doping charges,
he dribbled between glory and ignominy. God was with him through ‘the hand of
the god.’ At one end of his excellence, he is credited with the goal of the
century. But then his gluttony for goals in life included food, alcohol and
drugs also. In fact, Maradona and moderation never fitted in closely. From a
lithe demigod of an athlete, he went on to turn into a sniggering puffed up
drugs addict. From holding the world cup, and the consequent slaloming into
countless hearts, to barely holding his life in his fist after a cocaine-born
heart failure twenty years ago, he had hit crest and trough of life without
injuring his reputation.
The ‘Hand of God’ punching the ball into the English
net during the 1986 world cup quarter finals. His ruggedness was pinching but
his playing style was far more bewitching. In his football mad home country, he
was the quintessential ‘Golden Boy’. Like he out-jumped the England goalkeeper
Peter Shilton, almost twice his height, feigning to head but hoodwinking the
referee by patting the ball with his left hand, to score the ‘Hand of God’ goal,
he jumped over literally all norms to score goals and lead life the way his
free-will dictated.
Who can forget the goal of the century!? Just four
minutes after the ‘hand of god’, he hoodwinked all realistic expectations even
from normal geniuses. His 44 strides in 11 seconds involving 12 touches gave us
the greatest goal of the century. The 1986 Mexico world cup belonged to one man
only. He madly burst into boxes. He crazily brushed off defenders. He
maniacally squared off the ball towards the net. He magically outmuscled his
tall and giant-type markers. His stinging left footers would be drawn to the
net even from the toughest angle. Like a farmer ploughs through soil, his
flicks and dribbles scythed through a slew of defenders and hapless
goalkeepers. The blast of raw energy through his stocky bundle of animalistic
muscles left him an autocrat on the turf.
Polarity melted in the photogenic blizzard of his
dazzling runs. He was an angel as well as a devil, a rogue and a genius in the
same vein. He was too far from the singularity of existence and very near some
unpredictable multitude. He was reckless, brazen, desperado, sublime, elegant
and graceful in a space of few minutes between the ‘Hand of the God’ to the
‘goal of the century’, the latter almost divine in terms of its guts and
audacity. He gathers the ball to his side in the stadium, swings and opens up
two defenders, blazes on like a bursting comet, chest puffed out, his tongue
leering and jeering and cutting across like a knife through butter, cutting the
moorings of a posse of 7 English defenders to romp home to glory. This mesmeric
run is unsurpassed. Those 11 seconds, and a run of 60 yards, beginning from his
yard to the final romping home after rounding the English goalkeeper, involving
stepping on the ball, setting right, left and forward thrusts like a brute
steam engine, the opposition scattered in disarray, he creates history. Just
four years after the Falklands Islands war, where his country lost to the
opponents on the turf now, he had given enough to the entire nation to forget
the bruise and celebrate victory on the playground. The sweet redemption,
almost a kind of salvation for the millions of souls.
The stocky and strangely built spiral of life from a
small shanty town to superstardom had glorious twists as well as dark knots of
drug addiction in his stormy flings with life. He flirted with death with as
much ease as he did with the ball, the crazy behemoth.
As the supernova preparing to die out with a dazzle,
the tantalizing little giant had to be lifted out of his seat as a bloated
behemoth during a world cup match in Russia in 2018.
Imagine his hold on the psyches of fans across
continents. A band of Egyptian bandits freed a group of Argentine tourists
after coming to know that they were from Maradona’s country. A hero for the disadvantaged and
unprivileged, his pics on T-shirts boosted the morale of those who were born in
slums but had stars in their eyes.
His moves, both on the field and in the larger arena
of life, were sublime, uplifting, farcical, even tragic, all mixed in an
out-of-normal concoction. His outspoken tongue gave a good company to his magical
left foot in expressing the bulging life and spirit in him. No wonder he was a
salvation to an entire generation of Argentina.
Treat of the day! The tiny sadabahar in the crack of the wall bears a flower. There are hundreds of bigger flowering plants on the ground having dozens of petalous smiles. What makes this little flower exceptional? An entire season’s rains slipped down the wall. It’s not in mother earth’s lap where she stores water for her kids. It just has a hairline crack in the plastered wall to cling to its moisture of survival. Thousands of water drops slip away and then just an ounce of water may be clings to the narrowest root space. Fed like pampered children, the garden has hundreds of flowers. But this solitary flower high on the plastered wall is special. Blossoming is no slave to the conventional parameters of height, weight, the soil around roots, nutrition, the amount of rain or any other circumstantial fact. It’s only about giving the best with what you have. Given its tough conditions, this tiny flower grew in millimeters, while the rest of the more privileged flowers on the ground grew in inches. Their life might be measured in feet and hundreds of flowers. But what is exceptional about the fact of their existence? They are the happy-go-lucky types. Their smiles stand on mother earth’s piety. This but is a brave flower. It clung to survival, just staying a couple of inches of a fragile sapling high in the wall in the hot sweltering summer heat. It waited and waited with patience for more rains and when they came it added a couple of more inches to its height and there comes the flower. It’s basically about reaching home and fulfilling your destiny irrespective of the circumstances. What we get isn’t in our hands, but what we do with what we have is surely our calling. The smile of this flower is worth hundreds of lesser mortals in the garden below. It’s a proud flower, no wonder it’s there high in the air above the rest.
So dear friends, please avoid the mistake of cribbing about your circumstances of life. A lot many things definitely lie beyond our control. It’s better to accept certain facts. Take it as destiny. But that’s just half of the story. With what has been given to you by the quirks of fate, you are in the driving seat and juggle your pieces to make your own destiny. Like this little plant does. It blossoms a flower in the toughest of a situation and completes its journey, fulfils its meaning of being a flower. You too can blossom your flower with what you have been given. So forget about what you don’t have, just make use of what you have. You too are up for a flowery reward. Best wishes!
I am all for animal rights and against people using them in street circuses. Still I cannot help but feel the pining nostalgia of the monkey charmers during our grand old days in childhood. Those were the only well-behaved monkeys. Nicknamed Ramlal, Dharmender, Basanti, etc., clad in baby frocks and shirts, they were almost the devatas of the simian world. Holding a stick on his shoulders, Dharmender walked on two legs to bring his wife Basanti from her mayaka. And Basanti would say no to come back. He would then dance and put on goggles to woo her back. The little street show would proceed without even a single piece of the simian mischief! Why are people looking for the eighth wonder of the world? It already has been witnessed by so many of us.
Well that was past. The times have changed. Do you remember
the terrace pole overlooking the open bathroom below in the house having four
adolescent farmer girls? The crow’s favorite perch point. A monkey thinks why
should the crow have all the fun. So it has grabbed the pointed hot seat and is
hanging at the top end. If the motive is the same as that of the crow then it
almost falls within the criminal jurisprudence of the humans because the
offender is very near to us in inclinations and gene pool. The stalker has to
be brought to justice. On my part, I am praying that the pole’s top end itself
does justice where the peeping tom is trying to settle its red bottom at the
moment.
A monkey has to drink water but then it has to topple the vessel
holding the water as well. You wonder, was drinking just a side effect and the
main motive being to topple it to raise a blasting noise. A clay pitcher makes
a muffled thud. Unfortunately it gives this sound only once. My stock of clay
pitchers is over. The monkeys have had a lot of fun with them. They seem to be
furthering the interest of the pot-makers. This is a kind of use and throw fun
game for the monkeys. Now the metallic ones are doing their service. Here the
monkeys face a slight bit of inconvenience. The metal utensils make a sharp
clattering sound and the funster has to run away with its impact after the lewd
dose of rufianism. It’s better to turn an applauding spectator to their
follies. What is the use of boiling blood with no effect?
Just now another monkey is doing its best to derive some fun
in the most unorthodox manner. There is a house under construction. On the
terrace is a half-finished pillar having naked iron bars at the upper end. It’s
trying its level best to turn it into the thorniest crown in the world. It must
be very confident about its red bum bearing up with the risk. It’s within its
rights to do so but I find it pretty foolish even by their standards. Some
immature girl monkey may applaud his feat but the slightest mishap will turn
him the laughing stock of both the human and simian worlds. Organizing its
fickle mind in an unlikely way, it manages to sit right on top of the iron bars
and looks with a kingly attitude and royal majesty. Maybe sitting on the iron
bars testing the strength of the bum from below gives a totally different view
of the world.
The season is changing at long last. There are faded traces
of autumn. In late morning, when the sunrays have gentle warmth, the kittens
sprawl for the laziest sleep on the windswept terrace among the neem windfalls. The house crickets, the
brown denizens of the nocturnal chorus, also sleep under the items they deem
immobile and safe for the day. I just love disturbing them. Shake the covering off
and they hop around sleepily and take a vow to drill more holes in the clothing
where they can sneak in for better sleep. The winters will come after all.
On vintage autumn nights, tremulous dew-stars kiss the
seasonless silence spread over the lips of darkness. Someone’s exhausted sobs
and ceaseless moans now dive forever into the measureless serenity of the
slumbering eternity. A peasant woman has been crying late into the night. There
has been a loss somewhere. The high tide of darkness swallows the star. And the
gloom adds to its invisible shades to the far.
A cow has been lowing throughout the night to get a mate.
She is in heat and the farmer will surely get up with a smile in the morning
because it means the prospects of fresh milk for his children. It’s definitely
good news even for the village bull who hulks around looking for such chances
of the fresh milk arriving at the house of the farmers.
A drunkard farmer had to be slapped first and then thrashed
nicely by his tired wife late at night after he won’t stop his acrobatics at
the village square. He cannot do much as of now and bears up with the punishment.
But a hard kick prods out a slurred threat that he will see her in the morning.
‘In the morning my brothers will arrive to beat you even harder,’ she tells
him. Then he allows himself to be dragged into the house. I have information
from very credible sources that even after all this violence outside, they have
pretty busy lovemaking session right after.
Reading all through the night is fun sometimes. Try it
sometime. You share the night’s little mysteries and welcome a new day like a
kind host. The day smiles in gratitude. Across the misty, cool, dewy horizon, I
feel a new sun, a new fireball with blessing warm rays.
It’s a beautiful morning. The humid restlessness of the rainy
season is gone and the autumnal ease now assuages the spirits. A dragonfly is
resting on a sadabahar flower. Its
wings stretched to perfect horizontal. It has slept late. Did it go for a type
of night revelry? I tease it for its night fun and tickle at the pointed back end
of its slim body. It isn’t eager to get awake and just pulls it into a kind of
yawning morning-time curve. Her wings are but too precious to her. Try touching
them and it is wide alert and flies away for a busy day. A butterfly, a common
mormon, is also sleeping late on a cluster of night blooming jasmine. The
Parijat tree is a veritable shower of beautiful, fragrant white flowers. They
drizzle down with the rise of the sun. All around her there is a scented
drizzle of little flowers. May be it’s a boozed up butterfly who had extra fun
among the night blooming jasmine flowers and is now sleeping late in the
morning. A chatty tailorbird but doesn’t like the late risers and awakens the
butterfly with its exuberant vocals. The butterfly flies away to make the most
of the few days that mother existence has given in its kitty to fulfill the
purpose of its life.
The song of the birds picks up its tempo. Three pigeons fly
with a friendly banter; five ducks fly in a slanted line (there aren’t as many
as would allow them to form a V pattern because the water bodies have vanished
and so have the visiting ducks); a lone heron flies slowly with the unhurried
pace of an old gentleman; a few house sparrows dart swiftly; the dainty and
handsome Indian magpie robin hops on the parapet wall (seems happy, maybe got a
lover and is now joyfully silent after singing love songs in plenty for almost
a week). The morning has picked up nicely.
The sky is relieved of its duty of bearing the clouds on its
back. Having shed all that it had to give, it now looks fresh and light. Two
peacocks are also feeling very light after shedding their plumes. The weight of
love is gone. Of course, love is a very weighty issue these days. They are now
pecking and preening themselves pretty freely. They are quite friendly to each
other because now there is no competition for winning love in their favor. I
think the life of singlehood is quite light and one can be at ease like they
are now. They can fly for more distances as well.
The village has seen a lot of development around it. It has
now canals and roads all around it. It is good. We need canals for water and
roads for speedier movement. They did a fantastic job and at a great speed as
if they are in a hurry. They have been very busy in making roads and missed
quite simple things such as water drainage system and culverts to allow the rain
water go down south and fall into the seasonal distributaries of Yamuna. So the
ancient natural waterways are choked. Since we have had excess rains this
season, the surrounding farmlands and the village got filled up like a water
bowl. They now use big water bumps to take out the excess water. We humans know
how to be busy almost all the time. We are very serious about creating problems
and then we get onto finding solutions for the same very diligently. And that
keeps us very busy. It’s good to plan development but we shouldn’t run to
develop. I think a leisurely walk to development will do better because we
retain our common sense while doing so and don’t goof up to commit silly
mistakes. Rampant development leaves many loopholes and then we have to spend a
lot of energies in finding solutions for our self-created problems.
When I hold my three-month-old niece in my hands, I somehow
feel fulfilled with love and care. It’s a privilege to stand by her as she
fights her way out of multiple complications. Her one smile is enough to make
one forget thousand miseries of life. That’s what I try: Make her smile. And
when it comes, that pure smile, I feel like hitting a treasure instantly. She
scans the cloud patterns as I hold her in my arms, curious to know the strange
ways of this world. May be till they are infants, they see angels in the skies above.
When things around appear too complex, I pick up Bond Sahab’s
book. Immediately the layers of complexity peel off and you see simplicity and
purity of a world that all of us have the option to view. His books train your
mind to view life in simpler terms. Iranian movies are Bond Sahab’s cinematic
equivalent in taking you to a little world of simpler facts of life. The Willow
Tree but seems too serious for an Iranian movie. There is a kind of drama that
is typical of our movies. A professor gets his eyesight after 40 years. There
is a chasm between his feelings and what he wants to see. He wants to make up
for the lost decades and wants to see more and more of life. The face of his
wife, the angel who held his hand during the dark days, now appears too
ordinary in comparison to the beautiful women around.
Ranna’s Silence again is a beautiful little story. Little
5-year-old Ranna stops speaking after someone steals her hen, Kakoli. So loved
her hen so much that hearing fox or wolf alarm beats in the fields, on the way
to her school, she would run back to ensure the safety of her hen. As she lost
her hen, she disowned her smile and beautiful words also. Well, she was
instantly the same girl as of before as the thief realized his mistake and
returned the hen. Watch it if you want to feel how small things can help us
build a peaceful, simple world around us.
Hardeep comes to visit and shares the life lesson given by
his father. ‘Never go to Delhi if you can manage it at Sonipat, the nearest city.
And never go to the city if you can manage it at the village itself,’ he says.
Well, I think it’s basically an injunction about unnecessary loitering around.
As an adolescent boy he became very curious about Delhi and bunked school to
wander around in the Delhi crowd for the day. His father came to know. He asked
his mother to prepare a very tasty sweet halwa.
Hardeep ate to his full thinking he has been rewarded for possibly becoming the
family record holder who reached Delhi at the youngest age. So he ate to his
full and took happy burps. Then his father very affectionately put his hand on
his shoulder as they walked to their field by the canal. It was a grove of
fruit trees and handsome flowers that was enough to uplift anyone’s spirits.
There was just one oddity in all this. There was a terribly prickly plant in
between. His father made him stand by the prickly plant and tied a rope
bringing the boy and the plant in good bonhomie. Then he whipped him with a
rope and made him shout ‘I will never go to Delhi’ 1001 times. ‘He saved me
from doom, my kind father,’ he says. He is a trucker and a farmer now who tries
to avoid bookings to Delhi even if they pay him extra.
We had a little hawan
for our angel. Panditji’s son missed
on most of the Sanskrit slokas. He
seems very good at eating choicest delicacies served by the host though. He is
very cute and one can see the effect of the hosts’ offerings on his chubby
self. He made the mahamritunjya
mantra sound like some Latin hymn. He looked very apt for eating copious food
after the rituals but mastering the slokas
is, frankly speaking, not his domain. The old Pandit looked helplessly and then took it upon himself to somehow
salvage his honor. The goodwill for him will at least see his son getting good
charity for his mispronounced half-slokas.
It’s basically about respect. Out of the custom of respect, we would accept
wrong slokas as well. What is wrong
in that? Even the wrong slokas
chanted with good intentions will serve its purpose.
Treat of the day! The tiny sadabahar in the crack of the wall bears a flower. There are
hundreds of bigger flowering plants on the ground having dozens of petalous
smiles. What makes this little flower exceptional? An entire season’s rains
slipped down the wall. It’s not in mother earth’s lap where she stores water
for her kids. It just has a hairline crack in the plastered wall to cling to
its moisture of survival. Thousands of water drops slip away and then just an
ounce of water may be clings to the narrowest root space. Fed like pampered
children, the garden has hundreds of flowers. But this solitary flower high on
the plastered wall is special. Blossoming is no slave to the conventional
parameters of height, weight, the soil around roots, nutrition, the amount of
rain or any other circumstantial fact. It’s only about giving the best with
what you have. Given its tough conditions, this tiny flower grew in millimeters,
while the rest of the more privileged flowers on the ground grew in inches. Their
life might be measured in feet and hundreds of flowers. But what is exceptional
about the fact of their existence? They are the happy-go-lucky types. Their
smiles stand on mother earth’s piety. This but is a brave flower. It clung to
survival, just staying a couple of inches of a fragile sapling high in the wall
in the hot sweltering summer heat. It waited and waited with patience for more
rains and when they came it added a couple of more inches to its height and
there comes the flower. It’s basically about reaching home and fulfilling your
destiny irrespective of the circumstances. What we get isn’t in our hands, but
what we do with what we have is surely our calling. The smile of this flower is
worth hundreds of lesser mortals in the garden below. It’s a proud flower, no
wonder it’s there high in the air above the rest.
So dear friends, please avoid the mistake of cribbing about
your circumstances of life. A lot many things definitely lie beyond our
control. It’s better to accept certain facts. Take it as destiny. But that’s
just half of the story. With what has been given to you by the quirks of fate,
you are in the driving seat and juggle your pieces to make your own destiny.
Like this little plant does. It blossoms a flower in the toughest of a
situation and completes its journey, fulfils its meaning of being a flower. You
too can blossom your flower with what you have been given. So forget about what
you don’t have, just make use of what you have. You too are up for a flowery
reward. Best wishes!
