Fragrance of Love in Small, Sweet Stories

 

There are too many news stories going around with the alarming buzz of stinging bees. They strike, bite in fact, and spellbind our senses. Having pushed us into a spell of craziness, these unfortunately become the stories directing, misdirecting most of the time, the course of our lives.

Catching onto some good news is as good as maintaining hope and redeeming truth. Catch it, pamper it, and spread its soft message. Not just for truth but for a more loving self. We only get what we have been looking for and working for. Try to salvage good from the reams and reams of falsehood and propagandas. Pick it up. It may not be too shiny but its essential value is worth gold. Then please allow it to glitter a bit so that it imparts hope to some fading struggle somewhere.

Shallow, inconsequential earth-shaking impacts hardly bring fundamental changes. They rake up lot of dust though, which again gives you watery eyes. Slow, gentle warmth of almost intangible steps lets out the breezy pace of far deeper, effective changes than you think.

Anne Frank: “Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”

The real stories are very soft and small, beyond the big-staged melodrama. They lie buried under the shitty garbage dumps of bigger issues driven by hate, malice, discrimination, oppression and tyranny. And these real stories, having the morale of the story of creation, have love and harmony at the core. We just need to sieve these nuggets from the tons of useless sand to have our shining inspiration to lead a life of caring and compassion.

In anything around you, you won't find life's lessons put up on a hoarding as big-lettered scientific principles. These are the peanut seeds hidden in little stories and happenings around. You have to crack the story and eat the message. Lessons of hope and redemptions are packaged in tiny instances.

Massive occurrences have an earthquake type impact. They too have their messages, like war has message for peace. But it is indirect by showing the tragedy of blood and death. Here you learn your lessons from the fatality that has already taken its toll.

Small stories have a direct message of love and empathy. These even give clues to build up your tiny path of redemption. These are the songs of freedom and liberty. These guide you in searching your life's goal, help you in subduing your false fears and take to the stage of life with a bigger character than you are doing presently. These tiny morals ensure safe passage for the voice of your soul.

Jenova Chen: “I would say 'Flower' had a story. It is told through the environment.”

There is a fence separating the lesser us from the most exquisite version of us. The barrier comprises the posts and barbs of insecurities, fear, prejudices and anxieties. These small wire-cutters help you in cutting through the barbed fencing and help you in meeting the best version of yourself. These small lessons help you on the path of seeking truth. And mind you, no path to truth bypasses the garden of loving kindness. Each step dispels some rigidity, taking you closer and closer to your true self.

Ram Charan: “Life is one big love story with hundreds of little love stories within it.”

Forget about rockets, nukes, missiles, bombastic egos, skyrocketing sensex, high rises, malls, fashion, militaries, cars, bla bla bla. To me the tiniest story of love and compassion is bigger than any other story on earth.

I vividly recall the story of a stork with a plastic ring on its beak, an apt testimony to our crimes on Mother Nature. Among huge deluge of jingoistic battles of egos and power-aspiring super-species, this tiny story of our crimes against Mother Nature was unassumedly tucked in a corner. But then a run for redemption with still left out love and care in human heart made it up the best story. To me at least!

There are people who aren’t looking too high. They just look around for simple things. But their eyes are special. They have love and kindness. So this good soul clicks a two-and-half year old, male black-necked stork at Basai wasteland, some 34 kms from Delhi. On zooming the picture, the birder found a plastic ring stuck around the bird’s beak. The poor bird appeared on the brink of starvation, not being able to open its beak to eat or drink.

The Wildlife department set up three teams involving their own officials and people from Bombay Natural History Society. Apart from this, nature and bird lovers from Delhi and Haryana also volunteered. Hundreds of compassionate souls actually roamed around hundreds of kilometers in sweltering heat to undo a portion of our plasticized sins. It took these soldiers of love 5 days to save the bird.

In the last leg of the search, two young boys from Haryana, Rakesh Ahlawat and Sonu Dalal, ran for 4 kms to catch the bird just before the jaws of death waiting nearby in the form of hunger and thirst. Aren’t they and the others involved in the search real heroes? They didn’t do it for a small news item in the newspapers. They did it for love. To them a bird’s life matters. As long as there are such people, hope remains. And symbolism of such acts of love lays substantial foundations of collective efforts at long-delayed redemption of our conscience.    

I remember the two pictures: one with the stork having plastic ring around its beak and the other where it’s safely sheltered in a spacious cage with a tub of water and eatables in front. The transition from tragedy to motherly care. This, to me, is the real story.

Guys, high time we start undoing some of our collective sins. Imagine the pictures: the ring of death and the cradle of life. The first, our own doing; the second, some undoing on our part. Which one is preferable? Of course, the answer will be unanimous.

All of us can be loving heroes and heroines of such small stories. It doesn’t need special effort. All it takes is to accept your essentially kind and considerate nature.

Small Holds the Key to your Most Lovable Self

 

Mother Teresa: “Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.”

If you want to have a ‘complete’ picture of beauty, you have lost it. Forget. You will never get one. Irony is that life is brimming with beauty. Just that you have to notice in small frames. Spring breeze, birds chirping, sleepy pastures, snowy peaks, solitary woods, wild flowers, solitude-seeped stars, floating clouds, smiles, kindness, love and what not. The list is endless.

Great visions are pieced together through small, small frames caught by heart. Try it. Otherwise all this vastness out there has no meaning.

As Matt Bevin says, “While it may seem small, the ripple effects of small things is extraordinary.”

At a more practical level, take Napoleon Hill’s advice: “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.”

Everything is so cute in its smaller version. Try to remember how many times you got pangs of compassion and felt like hugging big bearded bad fellows. Not many, I am sure. And how many times you suffered the pangs to mollycoddle a little one? Many times, undoubtedly. Well man, small holds its charm. You can hold it. Take a pan shot of its vision. Reality gets more defined in a small frame. Take your shots. Love, compassion, harmony, grace and dignity are the lines that show you truth more realistically in a small frame. More importantly, small is never distant. It's near you in your day-to-day life. You need not be a gutsy voyager to seek it.

Simply observe small things. You bet it, the boons and perks are inversely proportional to their little size.

High time we realize the mammoth value of the small. Everything has an assortment of basic building blocks. Just that we are prone to ignore the constituents while staring at the larger picture. So guys let us dive into the world of micros. It’s full of wonders I tell you.

If you can't so much as smile back at a flower's innocent, selfless offer of fragrance and beauty, I doubt your readiness and ability to laugh and roll in pleasure over the bigger boons of life. Learn to love and like the small-small charms of life. These are the building blocks that get you the largest palace of happiness and meaning in life.

The palace of happiness never lies in totality. It merely lurks as the next milestone. We can never reach it. But along the way we can pick up little fragments of beauty, love and compassion that constitute the spirit of that palace of our dreams. So don't overstep a chance to light up your face with a smile. Don't miss a chance to bring the same curve of life on someone's lips who needs it.

Happiness always was and forever will be defined by small things. The bigger things are just mirages lurking fakely over the horizon. They exist only to delude us so that we keep running and stampede over our little chance of happiness. So guys pick up your tiny fragments of happiness lying there around you.

You don't have to run too far. Stay there. Smile. There are as many things in your life to be happy about as there are stars in the sky. But these are tiny, twinkling feeble spots with their ray of hope. These are not bombarding stars, dazzling the cosmos. Learn to love the tiny stars of your life, for they don't startle you. They just hold the tiny flicker of hope and happiness and well that's what life is: a small, hopeful, happy ray, gently twinkling, imperceptibly almost, for a journey from the unknown to some vestiges of knowledge and awareness. Best of luck travelers!

To Feel Lucky Observe the Misfortunes Around

 

Mahatma Gandhi says poverty is the worst form of violence.

James Baldwin: “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

Look around and you will see fire-pitted souls hammered on the anvil of poverty. See the sparks flying and draw your lessons. It fills you up with gratitude. You don’t feel like the pitiable most sufferer carrying the burden of this whole universe on your head.

Take some time out and observe those who daily put their physical selves in the furnace to earn survival morsels—laborers, peasants, daily wage earners, artisans, roadside vendors, hawkers, 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 dignity get burnt incessantly!

Plain hunger, of body and mind, in the long term, eats away emotions, which heart has retained so far as a shadowy solace to bear up with life defined by deprivations of all types imaginable. With emotions vaporizing off, leaving the pond dry, even the muddied past, having some motley stale water in heart’s pond, sounds a plain hypocrisy and then even the last traces of moisture hidden in bottom sands melts away like mud-banks get washed away under the fury of a spiteful flooded river. Robbed of the littlest treasures in their heart, they then face the naked truth. They are still the same person in public, but they are even robbed of that justification, that inner solace, which always came handy to support their fragile conscience. They are then plundered of even the rewards their conscience may provide. And then they survive almost mechanically. Well, that’s poverty!

Hunger always staring in the face, most of the common realities of life appear unachievable, wildest dreams. Every walk turns a struggle to survive. Every smile just a shadow of pain. Life simply comes to mean a wish to earn an extra penny in whatever you do, think, say or plan. That sums up the life. There is no respite. Hunger becomes your shadow, always with you, your inseparable companion. After a time you become used to it, and later get addicted to it. The starving shadow becomes the self. You love it more than even the real self. The personality becomes a hard-knotted dead wood. A dark hole that sucks its own light. A vacuum that 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.

Yea, poverty turns one almost sub-human, a different species altogether among the homo-sapiens. Is one life-time sufficient to escape its clutches? You become a brute like the bull snorting, pulling the cart, staring at the road, tearing the hooves, taking one painful, tired step after the other. You cannot look up and see this wide, spacious world brimming with countless beauties. You lose the faculty of your finer senses because they are of no use. Your vision is limited to the grains in the sands around your feet that 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?

To make it worse, it makes one feel terribly lonely, which is the ultimate poverty. Your compassionate self gets buried under the day-to-day survival war. You then survive on the periphery without hope, without redemption. You lose respect for your own self. It’s the biggest loss. You just end up counting your days like a miserable, indifferent street dog. Numerous petty humiliations dictate the course of your life.

The mere fact that you are reading these lines is a proof that you are far better placed than the people you just read about. Kiss your luck. It makes you wealthy. Don't compare your riches to the billionaires, compare it to these dusted destinies. You will feel gratitude. And gratitude is a fine fertilizer for getting a feeling of love for your situation and placement in life.

The sea of misery over there should at least make you aware of your luck and empathize with the fate of the lesser lucked ones. This awareness itself makes you let go off so many illusions, without any reasoning.

Osho says, suppose you have been holding a snake, taking it to be a rope. And the moment you find out, become aware, that it's a snake, your instincts will simply find you dropping it suddenly. That's what happens to most of the disillusions of life. You hold them as long as you are unaware. The moment awareness strikes, you just drop them all of a sudden. A tiny lamp and the darkness gone.

So don't feign ignorance to hide apathy. At least see the sea of misery. It will make you feel how lucky you are. It will fill up your soul with gratitude for your situations, your relationships, for your luck by default for being born in better situations then countless unfortunates. The lamp of this awareness dispels the dark and throws light on your loving persona. Have your sighs and tears for the lesser lucked ones. If not a social revolutionary, you will at least become a loving, kind and considerate person.

Empathy: The Seed-bed of Love

 

Ever saw the paradox of killing with one hand and saving with the other? We do it man! Systematically, institutionally and with our collective social ethos.

How precious is a new-born life! It’s more precious than anything else on earth. You cannot find anything to weigh its equal in the opposite pan. Nothing matters more than the survival of a new-born child. 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 this 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, fragile, weak and soft infant, 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 whiff 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 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 that 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 those 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 burn them. Sounds nonsensical, isn’t it?

We are born as a tiny ball of love. That is the essential seed of love. Even suicide bombers were once innocently laughing infants. Why then love gets buried deeper and deeper as we grow? Well, a lot has to do with our collective values, education system and family set-up. We basically raise kids to be more competitive and not loving and considerate beings. The latter are taken as signs of weakness. No wonder you have too many fighters. Just try to recall the last time you tried to make your child learn the importance of empathy! In winning, goals, ambition, competence and technology you may have given hundreds of lectures. So don’t cry over the evil spin-offs. You systematically bury the blossoms of love and then cry over the prickly cacti.  

Don’t you think our formal education can absorb a bit of the element of empathy? You can make rockets through science, and you hesitate to inculcate few fundamentals of understanding others’ concerns. Science in the hands of inconsiderate, insensitive people becomes dangerous. On the other hand, in the hands of loving people, it becomes the common instrument of enjoyment, fun, laughter and life.  

On a positive note, all of us have our stock of empathy. Just that we try to keep it buried under apathy by pretending ignorance. We simply need a bit of courage to put it into practice. It's purely an unused resource with us. It is not a humungous task. All you need is to resonate with others’ feelings. That's it. It doesn't belittle you. It enlarges your persona. By opening, you grow only. It’s a simple natural law, a mundane pre-requisite to self-rewarding greatness. Don't expect laurels and citations from the government and other institutions out there. Your best judge, your soul, will give you one. And it won't disappoint you. Believe me.

In the rat race of high IQ, we have forgotten the beauty of soft talents like self-discipline and empathy. But these softest things make you the strongest of a person. It gives social and emotional intelligence. You simply cannot have loving, healthy relationships without it because empathy has a mysterious power.

There might not be too much of a correlation between empathy and IQ. Our brains after all have different parts for these. But then don't you think just developing the IQ is lopsided. Why has then nature given us the space for EQ in our brains? Nothing is redundant in nature, by the way.

Every man has a bit of woman in him, and every woman has a bit of man in her. Sexes are not simply biological brackets. It's basically about the broad nature of masculine and feminine qualities to complete the picture in nature. Masculinity (outflow, aggression, tendency to win, to take, spread, fast rush and overcome) and femininity (receptiveness, poise, stillness, acceptance, to give, to embrace, slow pace, geniality) are two broad qualities in nature propelling the cause of creation ahead.

So much as you cherish the headstrong machismo traits in you, the feminine power of qualities like empathy will only complete the picture of your persona. It gives you the healthy balance to walk the tightrope. So feel no shame in boosting your brain's right hemisphere for a bit of romance, artistry and empathy to broaden the picture. It only completes you.

Isn't it that broadening your sense of relatedness to include a bit of space around you, gives you a bigger identity? It does without any doubt. It becomes a pathway to freedom. Masculinity might be the sword in your hand, femininity on the other hand is the breast plate of hardest steel on your chest. Survival isn’t just about attacking. It also means having the capacity to bear the brunt of someone’s attack.

Pests of Criminality in the Love Crop: Apathy

 

Helen Keller: “We may have found a cure for most evils; but we have found no remedy for the worst of them all, the apathy of human beings.”

The moment one succumbs to apathy, one surrenders a considerable portion of his/her loving self. To nurture our indifference, we feign ignorance many times. Allowing the bug of apathy to bite you is an open invitation to get caught in the quagmire of stinking mediocrity. It robs you of your chance to be great in your own ways because no greatness is complete without a kind, considerate and loving heart.

Leo Buscaglia: “I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.”

The best in you is unfortunately buried under a layer of apathy. It needs to be dug out. Changing the world means basically changing our own self. Look outside and you find it the most daunting task. Look within and you find the key.

Handle apathy, and you can avoid the creeping bugs of skepticism, which will definitely save you from becoming a cynical being. After that nothing matters too pointedly to burn your self in agony.

And now for a clearer picture, look around. Beware, murderer and robber are just an arm-length away!

Long before we see outright criminals, there is a low intensity, almost intangible process at the mass scale that eats into common psyche, facilitating mass apathy, boosting millions of transgressions. It makes an individual careless of his step, as long as it helps in reaching the perceived objective, and so many times this tiny step carries the massive effect of spoiling someone’s journey altogether.

Feeling lucky not to have come across a real-life murderer with blood-ridden hands and a dagger in hand? Feeling at ease not to have faced a robber, with muscular barrel chest, eye-patch and devilish beard running away with yours and others’ money? Well think again for you might be grossly mistaken. There are murderers and robbers on the prowl around. And in far more numbers than you can ever think even in your wildest of horrifying imagination.

There is a lot more violence hidden under masks than you see in actual battles, street quarrels and brawls. Fire of hate on the surface may not actually give clue to the smoldering heat under the surface. 

It can be your sheepish looking, harmless milkman, holding the potent weapon of slow death over the years. Yes the milkman with his passable crime, with little doses over months and years. In India the fight for self-survival is so brutal that poor milkman won’t flinch an eye before mixing urea and adhesives like Fevicol to make adulterated milk. It breeds death, slowly over months and years, with no sign of a murder committed. To the milkman all that matters is a successful day with all the pots empty and sold out. What happens later is none of his concerns.

It can be the sweet-tongued sweet-maker pampering your sweet-tooth with an affable smile and still honeyed words. Yes the sweet-maker with his shortcuts to profits with fake milk derivatives and cancerous chemicals and colors. And there are many, as many as you count the sweet shops, except for the few moralistic ones. India is crammed to the guts, and the mere struggle to survive, at any cost and through whatever means, justifies the end to get more bucks in the wallet.

It can be the poor-looking harmless fruit vendor. You even end up having sympathy for him. Little do you realize that the fruits you presume to add to your life are in fact cutting into your days. Their expertise to survive the cutthroat competition lies in artificial, cancerous, chemical-catalyzed ripening, waxing on the surface to make stale fruits look fresh and scores of other devil-devised machinations to get some more bucks at the cost of disease and destruction in others’ livers.

These are the murders on the safer side of law. Nobody dies instantly. Death comes slowly. It’s a visibly causeless disease. Nobody can be blamed. They vend out poison slowly, in mild doses. They add a day to their survival at the cost of years from the lives of those whom they serve.

There are robbers around as well, in clean shirts and socially respected avatars. Law cannot touch them because they don’t rob outrightly like the condemnable criminals barging into a bank and running away with the whole vault of money and gold. They do it in slow sips over years, as invisible cogs in the corrupt machinery. In both governmental and private institutions and departments, these legalized robbers sit on their desks with an affable smile and clean slate. It’s facilitation money. The extra money has to land invisibly into their pockets to move the process stuck at their check-post.  

Then there are countless petty criminals and transgressors, stomping their way to their destination at any cost. It’s an ant-swarm. Law never looks more impotent than in the face of such brazen frequency, everywhere, every moment: spitting, urinating, defecating, shouting, molesting, eve-teasing, raping and countless other forms of violence from the mildest to the heinous most. It makes it seem as if the rulebook is just a draw of lots for all the criminals around. Only a few are unlucky to get their name taken out as legal offenders. The rest clap over their luck for being left out.  

So there are murderers and robbers all around. And law cannot sneak into each and every soul to arise either fear or conscience to think of injustice done to others’ in the struggle to survive. Poverty and greed make a person too thick-skinned to be sensitive to the world beyond the self. The only option is to hope for a generational shift when more people will be aware of the issues beyond the limited self. Don’t you think we need to have the topics of kindness, consideration and civic sense in our curriculum?

Unfortunately with the Indian population ever-exploding, and more people fighting for diminishing resources, it seems a dream to visualize a society where the milkman, the fruit-vendor, the sweet-maker, the government officials and rest of the horde will become humane enough to be self-responsible and follow the laws even if there is no apparent risk of getting caught.

Law-abiding instincts get honed over a period of time. It’s like stopping at a red light on a totally empty road, in the depths of night, with absolutely nobody around, and no fear of punishment, but you still put up breaks, and smile. It gives a strange sense of contentment to be self-responsible for such tiny transgressions. Just looking forward to a day when majority of the Indians will come out of the pit of self-obsessed survival and be self-responsible not just for their own existence but for others’ convenience as well. 

Considerate individuals make a loving society where you at least take care of your fellow journeymen’s interests, or at least try not to stomp over neighborly feet. In this manner, we can avoid a stampede at least. With our little caring outlook in traffic, in parking lots, in bazaars, and everywhere, a small rectified step is far more effective in changing the system than you believe. If you still have any doubts about the effectiveness of your considerate, caring step, which in effect mathematically add to loving kindness, then I take some time to narrate an Arabic story.

A fire broke out in a city. Everybody was running around to salvage as much as possible before escaping to safety. From the wealthiest to the poorest, from the strongest to the weakest, all appeared in a mad frenzy to take something more from the pits of fire. A small sparrow but was seen scurrying back and forth between a pond nearby and the burning city. It would take a beakful of water and drop it into the fire. A powerful man saw this and laughed, “O little sparrow, when the world is burning, and so high and mighty find themselves helpless to do anything, what will your tiny drops do?” The sparrow said, “It might not mean much to the fire, but on the day of the judgment I will have the freedom of saying that I did what I could.”

Well, I don’t think we need to say more on this to emphasize the point.