Croakings of a Clumsy Frog -- 9

 

A geranium needs just a few beams of the early morning sun to spread its smile inside a dispirited room.

A sunflower, on the other hand, has to dare for a full stare into the sun’s fiery orbs to grin, smile, laugh or whatever these flowers have the nomenclature for this expression.

The night jasmine loves spooky midnight dark to chuckle mischievously perhaps. The sadabahar is unpretentious altogether, no nakhras at all. It is happy to smile all across the year at all places ranging from flower pots to weedy, uncemented brick-paved yards to even dung heaps. No wonder, the one smiles the best, who does it with the least conditions. This smiling spirit gives it the name that translates to ‘ever in bloom’.

A garden rose surely is coquettish and has lots of nakhras. It has to be pampered with cuddlish care. One has to get many a prickly pinches in managing a smile on the garden rose. But then it compensates very well with its beauty and fragrance.

The hibiscus stands as a pretty good smiling lady if you manage her well through her slippery adolescence, given her susceptibility to get in the company of pests and aphids who love her soft shoots. Be with her through this naughty time, she then becomes a big-hearted beauty having broad dimpled smiles. The butterflies have a whole lot of petalous boulevard to give rest to their wings on her big petals.

The bougainvillea hardly throws any tantrums. It has strong genes for many clusters of smiles. Even the traffic exhausts don’t intimidate it once it gets it smiley momentum.

The marigold is the sweet and nice eater of nutrients for it eats well to become a dark green fatty boy before it shows its cherubic grin.

Mind you, flowers aren’t all about only the velvety soft colourful landing sites for the butterflies, colours for our eyes and scent for our nostrils. Aconitum, the devil’s helmet, kills and viciously chuckles. Nerium oleander is the scented killer. Castor oil blooms can definitely castrate anyone’s pride.

Sum and summary is that all of us are good and bad in our funny, quirky ways. We the eccentric pop-ups have an idiosyncratic blend of strengths, weaknesses, negatives and positives, smiles and tears. Blend well with your surroundings. Being joyful is a habit. We can regularly remind ourselves to feel happy on principle. Make joy a hobby, a kind of propensity honed through practice. Start with flowers. See, how happy they seem all the time.

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Life can be a bit good, provided we know how to save our goodness from being eaten up to fatten someone's badness. It's always a fight between good and bad, the two beautiful mind-constructs to keep the engine of creation going.

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The dam of my patience breaks. I get an ecstatic ease after the release. But someone's life gets flooded.

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Some people are so practical and smart that their brain seems to be scattered all over their body. From that standard, I find myself pretty dim-witted.

Croakings of a Clumsy Frog -- 8

 

I know this is in contradiction to aesthetics. But then we have to acknowledge the dark as well. So couldn't help sharing this tantalizing piece of grey shades. By who else? GD Roberts in Shantaram. He says the paramount revenge, like the finest sex, is slowly and gently performed with the eyes wide open.

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With softly pining majesty,

silence sings a song,

Shadows grow long,

Her soft fingers brace my face

and go along a tear's trace.

Delicate tip of her finger bears the jewel,

A tear,

The tear that would have been

lost as a salty line on my face.

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If the situations and circumstances around you are muddy, count yourself lucky because you have been picked up to blossom the lotus of life in that mud. Ever saw a lotus smiling in clear waters? So guys just splash playfully in the mud. I promise it is worth it. Did you see a pig rolling in the mud? Well, that is bliss if ever there was any. It owns it mud fully. It doesn't try to hold onto the partial purity of future. It clings to its present mud with full passion. The pig just loves wallowing in its mud. Let the purity seekers waste their lives in reaching the holy pools to cleanse their souls. Let them ruin their present for a promised future. A pool of mud at hand is better than mere promises of holy bathing in uncertain future. Love your circumstances, feller. Try your decent bit and see whether you can change them a bit to your liking. If you manage it, well and good. If you can't change them, simply roll in them like a pig. It is blissful. Believe me!

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The sun playing hide and seek among floating clouds,

The humid air wispily whispering a smart secret,

The land lying languidly with overdose of love;

its pining thirst quenched

by the sky's countless kisses and love-drops,

A dove pair mating,

lost in the silent majesty of lusty innocence,

And he holding her hand

with a soft touch to cover stony realities,

A gentle kiss follows

to hide the mutual lies told

to make each other happy and joyful

for the time being.

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Whoever pleases and pacifies the Demons in us becomes our Angel.

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There are some ever-hungry questions. The questions, whose answers we have to seek, remain mere answerless questions for the entire life span. They turn into fistfuls of ashes that float in the holy waters of a revered river and keep moving in their quest to find the answers. The holy torrents take them to the ultimate sea where they rest finally with the river itself meeting its resting place. On the other hand, the questions whose answers fructify naturally of their own, like a rose blossoms in a garden, they take one's consciousness to the brink of the ultimate truth.

Croakings of a Clumsy Frog -- 7

 

Greedy, lustful gust of wind

clasped the fragrant petals

of the full-blossomed flower.

Covetous currents of its dark passion

tore the tiny vase of beauty and perfume.

Petals fly with dust in all directions.

The storm doesn't win

and the beauty doesn't lose!

The former loses battle over time and distance

and dies with thorny imprints

left by the stem on its viciously throbbing heart,

The latter spreads its cosily surrendered self

in the limitless folds of peace.

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If you lag behind, they will trample you.

If you run with the pack, they will try to push you to the sidelines.

If you outpace them, they will pull your leg.

Well, that's human society for you!

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Lynched by loneliness,

I surrendered to the

sweet tyranny of solitude,

The wounds healed,

The suffering receded,

They moved away

like shifting shadows,

Painful memories lagged behind

and turned milestones on the foggy path,

Of course sweet breeze blows sometimes

and carries syrupy memories from behind,

They leave a smile on my lips

and are again left behind, as I move on,

like sweet path-side flowers,

I look back,

They wave a sweet good bye

with a still sweeter sigh,

And thus we have to move on,

All alone

to our destination next,

And pitch our tent at one fine dusk

and go for a long, long sleep.

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Croakings of a Clumsy Frog -- 6

 

Life is just a choice to be alive.

A little frog is croaking and jumping in a little rain puddle. ‘Why is it dancing?’ I wonder. ‘Probably it’s very happy,’ I get an answer as per our own equation of happiness. ‘But why is it happy?’ the sceptic inside again tries to get an explanation. ‘It’s happy because it’s dancing,’ this isn’t my idea. It has landed from a higher plane.

Things just exist in an unqualified, unconditional state. The ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘when’, ‘where’ are mere cognitive consequences of the neuro-transmitters cascading in the brainy matter. Within its exclusive zone of happening, everything is cause and effect at the same time. Imagine two points on a circle. Each point leads as well as follows the other at the same time. And their journey can be endless on the circular path.

Cause breeds effect; effect sires new causes. Creation sows the seeds of destruction; and destruction conceives creation. Everything is round about. ‘Sab gol gol!’ as a mendicant friar exclaimed by the Ganges. A big sunya. Here nothingness breeds everything; and everything sums up to be nothing.

It’s just a mammoth humming, buzzing, vibratory drama. Play your tunes well and dance like the little frog. To be happy and joyful is a matter of choice. Food, clothing, career, hobbies are what make one feel better and happy. So isn’t happiness a choice? Choose what makes you feel better. Now, who says happiness isn’t a choice? Beyond philosophies, simply choose what makes you happy. It will gradually turn you joyful.

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Why do I like my corrupt politician?

The urge to rule and dominate used brutal force to stay in power in the ancient times. Then we started getting civilized and the concept of outright blood and gore to dominate and rule was challenged by the civilized norms of peace, harmony, rights, responsibility, equality, ethics, etc. Of course, there is still blood and war in different parts of the world but the voices opposing it are very significant also.

Politicians are far better than the outright savage killers. They, at the most, draw invisible white blood instead of the real red one. Politicians cut the vision of the masses, to keep it suitable to their purpose, instead of gauzing out eyes altogether. They try to cut down your thinking to reshape it on their scheming anvil instead of outright beheading. On the other hand, apolitical power aspirants have hardly any inhibition in pulling out eyes and cutting throats. As a chicken-hearted writer, I always prefer non-physical cutting over the physical one. I am always in gratitude to our politicians for they have spared my limbs and allowed me to retain my croaking. With their clever as well as cunning acumen, they may push me into the corridors ignominy and pathetic survival. However, at least I still get a chance to keep croaking.

Politics is the craft of creating mammoth mountains of symbolism out of tiny molehills of facts or even fiction. It's extremely cunning but very creative work. The massive loafs of cloud then roam in our minds, covering the real from the unreal. The sun of truth stays above. And in the shadows, the fractions of truth, beliefs, conventions and set-up narratives mischievously condition the mind to think in a definite pattern for big gains for the politicians. All this allows them to claim power and its pelf in majorly bloodless ways, save some minor aberrations here and there.

What I fear the most is the apolitical power aspirants like religious fundamentalists. Do you think Taliban will allow any unbecoming croaking to their ears? Never! They are perfectly apolitical. And believe in drawing direct, real, red blood. In comparison, our khadi-clad politician rulers seem angels. Learn to love your political rulers, fella. Ask those who haven’t political rulers sitting over their head and instead have apolitical direct power claimants. Ask any educated Afghani person, running away from the land of misery, what it means to be ruled by ‘active fists’ instead of ‘scheming minds’. You will have all your answers.

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Croakings of a Clumsy Frog --- 5

 

Even the words of sympathy and the emotions of piety serve as a decent fraction of the practical fight for justice in terms of utility. So feel proud for your contribution to a greater cause. If you still feel helpless and guilty for not doing even that then recall the memories of any selfless soul that you remember on account of his/her deeds and you nurture a strain of greatness in your DNA.

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The Governments waste more energy in defending their wrong rather than justifying their right.

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If a few thousand votes cast in secrecy can make you the so called law-maker, then the millions of open and non-secretive shouts in someone’s support earn him the status of law-defender. Governments you just cannot ignore the civil society’s cause. It comes with far better democratic legitimacy than you guys.

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Conversation with a Stranger:

One day he asked someone hiding inside

the bodily façade like a fugitive,

‘Who are thou?

And why despite all the architectural negativities

people define thou positively?’

From it unreachable deep cellar

that someone raised it germ-free, disinfected voice,

‘I am the exiled one without choice,

While the bones and the flesh around me

in worldly spotlight rejoice,

I just take the ordained backseat

and watch the game of

birth, survival, struggle and death

played inside the castle on the shaking stage.’

‘Don’t you feel perplexed by the passing days?’

Again the query was voiced,

‘Don’t you feel bad or ever you rejoiced?’

It answered in a heavy, impassive tone,

‘Thy gimmick cannot shake my throne,

In the timeless shades I spend my time here

and when the castle will be broken

the death squad will find the door open,

Away I’ll fly with the figures of

deeds and misdeeds to the final court,

and if it is found short,

again I’ll be exiled.

It has been like this for thousands of years,

but I never rejoice at new birth

nor weep at death and shed tears,

My book lies in mighty primordial hands

and the player to settle scores changes with worldly trends,

I am the same forlorn, exiled child

of the majestic, mighty father,

It’s a never-ending game perhaps,

A tiny cog on the chessboard of creation,

Let’s see how high and mighty you make the castle,

Void will then gobble the stone and stars!’

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