Nostalgia: Virginal Sensation of Love

 

There are tiny specks of golden memories carrying far more nostalgic weightage than you can imagine. Use their rasping, filing power to smoothen the painful edges of a stressed self. Cumbersome memories have the tendency to dull the screen of your being, clouding your vision, making you feel lost. On the other hand, the incredibly fascinating anecdotes can actually help you in getting a firmer hold on your present.

The enchanting haze of nostalgia can wipe out the trace of many a pinching real-life fact plaguing your present. And then who knows you may even nurture fresh perspectives on life because looking with a detached musing self, you acquire a mystical objectivity of looking at things. The warm glow of lilting memories melts the iron hard blockages in the course of life. It has a tendency to spread the self. And spreading is freedom. Believe me! Try it!

Nostalgia is your seductive lover. It will pull you through the cloud of pain. It's a free lease to your loving self as it finds itself cramped for space due to chaotic present. The ephemeral notes of these disjointed anecdotes weave a sweet harmony. There is a malleable softness that titillates one's heart. It triggers a balmy effect, you smile, you get an installment of self-love. A loving nature is just the bonus you draw.

These moments stand out with an eternal calmness. It has a bouquet of emotions. You feel restful sadness and smiling gratitude for the things that came your way and laid the foundation for what you became later. It nurtures gratefulness.

You somehow find your ground with this thin cord relating you to what you were, showing a small milestone reached by you. It's beyond big bang events. They are your moments that refuge to be swashed down the drain. There is no logic why they stand out so prominently because on the surface they are almost inconsequential to your life's journey. These are simply the milestones on the highway of your march.

You simply cannot miss the exhilaration you feel as they tug at your sleeve with the innocence of a little child. Reciprocate. Smile back. Give them your finger to hold onto for some time. You will never feel losing something while you slow down to give them a hearing.

Slow notes of romance seize you. You become aware of a universal sense of mundane things. A few soft shades beat the vibrant, exaggerated colors of the present.

Such balmy moments never fail to give a smile to my lips. A deep sense of purpose surfaces. I quite interestingly find myself more humane and more loving after entertaining these small time guests.

The Matricidal Tale of the Biggest Sinner

 

The August rains wreak havoc across many parts of Asia, uprooting millions who stay closest to earth. These hapless masses, occupying just a tiny shelter and a few cattle, have hardly any role in robbing the pristine slopes of their natural armor and in corroding ecological immunity, still they suffer the most.

The behemoths, whose rapacious juggernaut rapes the natural resources, hardly get affected directly. The geography of a plush cocoon in a high-rise may save them, but the stinking, suffocating atmospherics of an asthmatic earth, with lungs hardly functioning without trees, will come to lay its evil, chuckling grip on their plump, neck-tied throats sooner or later. Let them have air-purifiers, as they may brag about it. How many times you will have your funny oxygen toy with you? Will you use it even while shitting and fucking? Well, if you do, then my dear poor plunderer let me remind you that you are nothing more than a caged bird. If you still have the heart to take your golden cage as the palace of freedom and liberty then please carry on. One more thing, terminal diseases hardly think twice before knocking at a thatched hut or an ivory-paneled palace.  

The naked, raped slopes cascade down, crying testimony to their rape and plunder. As they lose their space, they vanish with a silent curse, ‘Humans, even you will lose, cringe, fret and fight for mere inches of space!’ Aren’t we suffering with the curse, as we engage in wars over wastelands and pay mountains of money pooled over generations just to buy a few yards of space in congested urban ghettos?

The spiteful rivers shout the tale of mankind’s scourge. The dying rivers polluted with the illegitimate semen of our industrial plants, breathe their last with a muffled, choked curse, ‘Humans you will have to pay for every single drop of water!’ Aren’t we paying for water now? The grandest trees fall telling another tale of agony and tragedy, ‘Fools, you will have to pay for every breath to survive!’ Don’t worry, very soon clean air will claim a major portion of your savings in the cities. The glaciers fall with the majesty of grand old men killed by their own grandchildren out of criminal neglect. Many species become extinct, taking a final breath with a curse on the man and his kind. It’s mother earth’s big, loud, painful cry, you damn fools!

Mother earth’s lungs are burning. As the fresh, verdant, lively, life-giving woods get charred to lifeless ash, the mankind has taken one more step toward the inevitable doom. The lungs of earth, the Amazon forests, supplying 20% of the total oxygen to the mother planet, are turning to smoldering char and dead ash. Nobody seems to be bothered. It hardly qualifies as serious international news. The golden haired top-boss of the world and a small, plump Romeo, bursting at his skin’s seams, shaking hands to take a break from their respective follies pleasantly startles the planet. The message reaches everywhere from the hungriest bellies in the remotest hamlets in Africa to the well-fed rats in the gutters of the financial mega-hubs housing the dens of lies, conceits, exploits and plunder. But the lungs of mother planet burning and collapsing hardly qualifies to be a news-studio worthy beat.

The modern civilization appears to be too solution-oriented. Ironically, all these are mere solutions to its own self-crafted problems. So, the simple question is: why create so many problems in the first place? Can’t we have a simple model of development that doesn’t create problems primarily, thus saving us later from falling into a vicious circle of running after solutions? However, when you use your creativity and potential to find a solution to self-generated problems, instead of going back and rectifying the flawed model that led to the problems, you enter a futile circle where both solutions and problems compete against each other to create further problems.

Proud of its caliber and technological advancement, the modern civilization believes in grafts and transplants. It’s taken as the hallmark of scientific prowess. Isn’t it funny? I mean just having to pursue solutions for the follies that we are knowingly committing. It’s outrightly fatalistic. It just fights the evil-effects of the well-proposed and efficiently implemented policies and plans. Why doesn’t it just show innovation in being with the natural mechanisms that support human life? Why does it put all human potential in first deliberately destroying its overall home and then use institutions, NGOs, armies, research institutes, medicine, innovation and planning commissions to plan on a bigger scale to undo the self-inflicted harm? It is simply as fatalistic as a snake eating its own tail to survive. The poor thing assumes that it’s moving on the path of survival. Little does it realize, it’s progressing on the trail of its own annihilation.

So, as the news channels and those who matter waste their lungpower in school-boyish scuttles and slips, the pristine flora and fauna in the most luscious natural region of mother earth burns to lifeless ash. To the land-monger modern civilization, a clear patch is more important than a clump of trees. The issues of trees and environment are left for the future generations to handle as they deem it fit. Basically, we are showering the so-called parental love and care on our children just to leave them suffering in the concrete gas chambers a few decades down the line. There cannot be a graver and more shortsighted version of self-seeking love.

Fighting Sparrows and Broken Eggs

 

The hate in humans is being spilled over into the natural scheme of things. In non-human species, the natural instincts are adapting to the rulebook of the super-species. 

Cooling in the elixir of postmodernist glow?  There are deft strokes, steely lines and spools of songs about our achievements. However, there are pale beacons that beat the fog with their pallid but penetrating light.

The angelic, sacred balance defining the natural laws has been violated and warped. Something basically wrong has happened with nature during the present scandalous times.

Have you ever seen a sparrow couple fighting out with another, the latter having set up its nest, mated, laid eggs and waiting for hatching under the mother’s warm fur and father’s protective gaze? It does happen now. The force of human touch is too strong on nature. Everything is getting humanized. With due respect to the pardonable—beyond the realm of sin and piety—non-judgemental fight among innocently instinct-led lives in the animal and bird kingdoms, we can still brand it as the most gruesome attack on somebody’s home and hearth to fulfil the basest of a selfish motive.

They were furiously screeching and abusively chirping. Their beaks bit into the rivals’ fur mercilessly. Their little claws trying to gouge out the opponents’ eyes. Mind you, it had all human connotations. Their rumpled feathers and crumpled fur had all the elements of a bloody street fight among we humans. And what was it for? To grab the nest, of course.

Possibly the fact that the nest had the smell of human hand in making it had something to do with the things going nasty like among the supreme species of earth. It was a barn roof made of wooden rafters and stone slabs. The box made of plywood was attached to one of the rafters. It hung there with a broad look of TO LET for free at the uncemented, brick-laid floor below.

Earlier this transgressing couple hardly cared to look at the abandoned nest, vacant after the previous hatching, waiting for some laborious sparrow couple to sort out things for another cycle of home-making by the new entrants. Then a diligent couple arrived looking for a secure home. Finding the odour of long-left nestlings inimical to their pure, non-short-cutting instinct to procreate and preserve, they worked to bring it into order for a new homely start. Old bird-drops smitten sinews were thrown down piece by piece and new ones fixed for a brand new cosy interior. Then eggs were laid and the expectant moments for hatching started.

Now there was a fight at hand. Perhaps, it’s the modern day norm to destroy before getting on to the next step in the journey. The way they—the attacking couple, led by their hissing instinct which easily overpowered the much mellowed down parental defence—beat out the parents waiting for the fluid in their tiny eggs to form and shape into nestlings, made them condemnable as the rogue, brutish couple. Broken shells and scattered fluid on the ground for ant-feed provided testimony to the charge against them.

The winners knew that the mourning couple will take one more day to keep fussing around the site, so unashamedly they mated on a nearby tree, fully sure of their possession of the nest. The next day, they started flitting in and out of the grassy shelter, with spring in their flight and much mirth in their dives; making minor adjustments to the grabbed property to satisfy that primordial birdie instinct to make a new nest before drawing out procreative self’s best. Very cleverly, they made those minor adjustments; gave themselves a clean chit and life started again in the nest.

Why have even birds started taking short-cuts like humans, stepping over others’ toes in the selfish stampede, crushing others’ dreams to fulfil personal motives? Very intelligently the birds around the human world have also picked out a few paying lessons from our book of practicality.

Is love such an outlandish idea for the modern civilization?

Dead Vultures and Well-ground Meat

 

There were times when we had vultures in north India. Beyond their metaphorical abusive usage in languages, they flew very high. They roamed freely in the bluish depths of undisturbed skies. Floating majestically, their wings sprawled out in utter peace and calm, they looked like the inhabitants of a separate world. They were too far and safe. They were detached, but as an earthling, you cannot ignore earth however high you can fly.

Away from man’s reach—save some incidences when they crashed into man-made metallic birds—they floated free and landed only when there was something lying on ground with no more life, no more play in the hustle and bustle of things; something beyond the survival matrix of sweat and blood; something totally passive to the pulsating throngs of life. And they swooped down, the scavengers from the skies.

They descended matter-of-factly. Cutting air with their sun-parched wings, coming to the world of we humans, to play their part in the natural scheme of things allocated to them. Beyond the bloody, brutal and sordid pulls of their pointed, hooked bills into the dead innards, they appeared self-effacing, modest scavengers going with their duty to help clean up the system. They appeared even saintly with their sad, drooping eyes!

I remember a whole fat, lifeless cattle turn into a skeleton in some odd hours, leaving no scrape of flesh around any bone, and no foul, stinking odor later on. The dogs took onto the bones, lost in the mirage of pacifying hunger from the deepest depth of a well where there might not be any water.

Then Diclofenac, a cattle medicine, came. The more the vulture did their duty for the dead, the more death did its duty on them. The vultures lost their skies. They got sick and fell from the sovereignty of their skies: one more entry to the increasing list of extinct birds. A very casual occurrence though. The skies became clear. Only mankind’s steel birds have a right to fly that high.

We don’t have vultures now. Only airplanes can go so high. The ethereal blue is calm and steeped in history. Of course the dead cattle need to be disposed off. The farmers bury these in shallow sand-pits. The dogs pick up the trail, dig out and chew on the sandy rot. And a huge cumbersome cloud of foulest odor clumsily reaches human nostrils to remind them of the species that is extinct now. Not too many mind though.

The dogs, on their part, now go to the metalled road to meet their famous death, the much anointed dialogue, kutte ki maut, which is rarely natural. Death and its agents need not push themselves to grab their share on the road. It’s National Highway 334 B running through the densest rural and town settlements across central Haryana, starting from Western Uttar Pradesh, crossing Yamuna and going crosswise in Haryana from east to west. Till a year back it was merely a district road. But then they suddenly changed it into a national highway without adding to its dimensions. It’s just a two-lane road without any lane divider. The heaviest to the lightest vehicles ply bumper to bumper day in and day out. Accidents happen rampantly. The latter is no longer news even in the town supplements of the local dailies.

The truckers have grabbed its link to Rajasthan and southern Haryana, with even more greed than a hungry vulture of decades. There is no toll tax on this link. It saves them 1200 rupees. This much money matters man! Even the time it saves also matters. So human safely is lost in the smoke exhaust.

Overloaded trawlers ply gleefully. It’s a journey of overs: overload, overspeed and overgreed. Transport companies put up rewards for the fastest drivers. In the mad rush, rules, regulations, care and concern take a back seat. And people die in road accidents. Almost daily there is a fatality. In a neighboring village, two brothers, one 17 and the other 19, going to their fields to prepare for physical tests for army recruitment, were crushed to death early one morning. The tragedy isn’t the odd one out. There are many but they get buried in the tar under speeding, burning wheels.

The dogs too, knowing that there are no vultures, come under the heavy wheels to get crushed to a pulpy, well-ground meat. Even bones get ground easily; the vehicles are so heavy after all. Years back, when there were vultures, a dog hit by a vehicle, would be at least dragged to the roadside trench. Vehicles were sparse, wheels were smaller, speed was less and people had time to respect even a dog’s dead body and threw it into the roadside pit. Then the vultures would take up, efficiently, smoothly and surgically.

Now right after the first hit, you cannot tell whether it was a dog, a cat or pig. Wheels are endless. It gets crushed within minutes, first to a juicy broth, then to dry sponge, the blood absorbed by the burning tar under hot wheels. It’s dry before you realize. The eddies of smoky wind let loose by tyres then puff away the last grains. It’s quicker than even the biggest horde of vultures.

No man, possibly there is no need of vultures now. Metaphorically though vultures exist, thriving in fact, as we add to the haramzaadgi in us.

A Day in the Life of a Peacock

 

Since the days of caves, we grew up to take other animals as foes. Then thanks to our skulls full of contriving ideas, we outsmarted most of the species to take control of things. Further on, in the march of civilization, we turned indifferent to the plight of our fellow constituents in nature. And now we have accepted their fate to be extinct. But then we have to be prepared to face the extinction of lot many things we relate to as human beings.

Simple days and moments in the lives of animals are no longer the regular times. These are defined by we humans.

Pre-monsoons have been kinder this year. Just at the beginning of the rainy season, the air is humid and clouds display teasing games of surprise and showers in the sky. For the last one week there is lull period though.

It’s unbearably hot and humid. Mother is busy finishing the first-half chores of the day. The peacock lands in the courtyard with its riot of colors. It arrives with a small storm that airs the desultory weather. Unfortunately, there are no chapattis left from last night supper. This particular peacock likes chapattis more than the grains. She knows it from her experience. It hardly put its beak into the grainy offerings in the past. Chapattis, on the other hand, it relishes almost like humans. She feels sorry for it, “There are no chapattis son!” However, the feathered son follows her in the courtyard. She even tries to shoo it away so that it can reach some other door-step and beat its hunger at the earliest.

The multi-colored guest is panting in the heat and humidity. It cranes out its royal blue neck to search for the chapatti pieces. They aren’t to be found. It then follows mother to the innermost recesses of the house. It seems to have run out of its options in the wilderness. The pesticides in the surrounding farms killed the rodents, reptiles and insects in a greedy swipe. The food is gone. It’s famine for him and bumper crop for the farmers.

Hardly any option left for the poor national bird. Hunger is a terrible pusher. It changes one from what one generally is. The fear of hunger is worse than most of other fears. So the big bird, having run out of natural options, follows her. With panting beak, beating its natural instincts to be scared of the humans, it kowtows her to grab the moment of her generosity. Her heart melts, “No chapattis today! And you don’t eat grains, but still try these today.” She puts a bowl of multiple grains including wheat and pulses.

When you are really hungry, the choice and type of the food don’t matter. With quick beakfuls, even not caring to crane out its neck to ensure safety, the poor thing gulps down the grains. Mother looks sadly at it, “Poor thing isn’t cribbing about food.”

It just wants to beat hunger. Having eaten to its full, it takes some pecks in the clay water bowl left on the courtyard wall and swoops away, swooshing the air with glitter of multiple colors under the sun. It has ensured a day’s survival in a world where its next generation has almost no place. 

Guys, isn’t it sad that the world as we have known it is coming to an end? Isn’t it our duty to do the littlest we can do to help the dream last a bit longer? Plant a tree on the special occasions in your life. Try to use organic products. Cut down on disposable plastic by carrying your shopping bags and water bottles with you. There are more than seven billion people, and tiniest contribution by everyone will make a difference. It may breed a culture of care and consideration. Then who knows the future generations may still be lucky to see at least that much of nature as we have seen.