The Power of Faith

 

Many decades back, it was a scrub forest in the countryside surrounding my village. The distances were still measured by creaking cartwheels even though rolling tyres had made their presence felt. A sanyasi meditated in a little cave dug into an earthen mound overlooking a little pool of water in the scrub forest. As he meditated, a wolf and a cobra stayed nearby. He achieved enlightenment. Now we have the holy pond surrounded by a tiny grove of banyan, peepal and neem trees.

The place carries its mystique and solitariness, where one can still feel the aromatic wafts of the holy man’s spirituality. There is an elemental sound of faith reverberating through the gusts of breeze playing with the leaves. Silence and peace is unperturbed as the moments pass in tuneful glides with harmony. Birds have a melodious regaling among the trees. A family of green pigeons safely coos in the banyan canopy. There is a group of fourteen geese that own the pond waters and they assert their rights pretty noisily now and then.

The holy man used to bathe in the tiny pond. Faith is feisty, disarming and daring. Our own self is its mighty nurturer. The waters in the little pond heal skin allergies. Many people have been cured and the myth stays with the little mossy pool.

In the little shrine commemorating the holy man, a priest draws healing powers from the holy man’s legacy. He acts as a faith healer and his simple process of chanting mantras and blessings—drawing sustenance from the holy man’s spiritual energies—cures people of typhoid. Many people authenticate the efficacy of this faith-healing treatment. Long lasting are the effects of meditations.

The place has all that it takes for the seekers of silence and peace. The offerings at the little temple sustain birds and a few dogs on the premises. The seeds of penance leave behind a crop that serves humanity, and some animals and birds also, for a long time.

The New Bride

 

She is a new bride, pretty looking, slender and curvaceous with a biting pout on her lips. Whatever energy is left after the night revelries driven by the youthful passion, she spends it on her mother-in-law. The old woman has a loafy, gruffy, rumbling tone that booms in a dull way. It’s highly inept for fighting. The young woman, on the other hand, is incisive like a knife. Her high-pitched, sharp notes cut through the buttery, loafy resistance of her mother-in-law. Who wins is a foregone conclusion. She easily tames the old woman during the day. For the nights, her pretty face and slender figure is more than sufficient to tame the already exhausted husband who works in a needle factory in a nearby town. He is well aware of the dangers presented by small, sharp, incisive things. And thus starts another little story of lengthening another pedigree.

The Matrimonial Bamboo

 

A guy married very late, at the age of forty in fact. In the conservative village society, it’s almost like getting married while you are peeping into your grave. They would love child marriages any day. His classmate in the village school meets him after a few years. ‘I hardly meant to marry but this society, peer pressure, and family and relatives nagging my soul day and night forced me into marriage at last. I couldn’t handle it anymore. It was like they had put the end of a stick into my bum and held it to maneuver around,’ he lamented. ‘And now by agreeing to get married, you have allowed the stick to be entirely thrust inside you, so carry it smartly now,’ the friend quipped matter of factly.

Faceless Gods (Second Edition, Vol 1)

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This story was written around the turn of the century. I was in my twenties and the world almost a mirage viewed through emotional prism. That is primarily the reason for the work’s poetic overtones. Now when I look at it, it seems a long verse written in prose conveying poignant, hard-hitting emotions. But anything not too near, out of compulsion, formalized decency and polished made-up diplomacy is nearer to truth by default. Truth is bitter as they say. But I have tried to mellow down that bitterness by the use of sweet poetic language.

For two-and-half decades since the book was born I have sent it to hundreds of publishers and literary agents. I have written countless mails. Nothing goes waste. It at the least gave me a very nice writing practice.

It’s natural to get bugged with skepticism about your own worth in the face of endless rejections of your creation or when you don’t have a single response kindling some hope. But if you still feel the call of your art, be sure that it’s your real destiny. If your script gets rejected a thousand times—like mine—and if you still feel motivated to write and in fact feel better while pursuing your write-ups then believe me writing is your destiny. Recognition and being famous has absolutely nothing to do with it because you have already crossed the golden threshold to become a nishkam karmayogi, the one who gives her all to a task without getting bothered about the outcome.

First, you have to recognize that this is worth your time and effort. Self-evaluation is the benchmark through which others will evaluate you. And that dear readers keeps me going.

Many people tell me that my language is on the harder side, that I use words that don’t fall in conversational genre, that my sentence structure is complex, which slows down the pace of reading and comprehension. They may have a point but so have I. As far as difficult words are concerned, why do we have them in the first place? Do we keep them in the dictionary only as examples never to followed or used? If we believe it to be so then it sounds an abuse to language and linguistics. In my understanding, it shows our lack of skills rather than the suitability or unsuitability of those words.

We have the words, in the first place, because they have relevance and ought to be used simply because they have been devised to be used. If we come across a difficult word, we should try to know its meaning. Those who overemphasize the importance of smooth reading maybe keep a book just for ‘reading’ instead of ‘studying’. Hell doesn’t break loose if we pause while ‘reading’ and ‘study’ the meaning of a new word. That differentiates ‘reading’ from ‘studying’. The latter makes you a student for life. My books are basically for the ‘students’ who have chosen to be the eternal learners of life, living and language.

I know the publishing industry is dominated by the ‘readers school’. It fetches big numbers and still bigger business. Nothing wrong with that. Thankfully, the self-publishing platforms provide the writers like me plenty of options to continue their writing passion in the hope that out of thousands of readers there are a few students who will take up the message contained in the book. It may not add dollars to a publisher’s account but the contents will surely add something positive to the life of a student in many ways.

The present edition contains some added chapters and changes that I deem it fit to be included as per my present knowledge and understanding of the issues involved in the story.

It is a slowly moving story, meandering like a river in its journey through the plains. It is just an effort to highlight some sober facts like the true meaning of nationalism, religion, politics and humanism. Some people may think that the work has very sharp political connotations. This but is an espousal of the cause of clean politics. It may sound dreamy but the basic contours of humanism are almost utopian in nature. How will the things change if we don’t dream of a perfect state of affairs? A utopian dream is the womb in which even the worst gets transformed into a tolerable reality.

https://notionpress.com/read/faceless-gods-1388339

Fathers and Sons

 

In the past, an old man’s wife found fresh dose of love in her late fifties. She ditched him and eloped with her middle-aged lover, leaving behind a brood of five grown up men and women, two of them already having little children of their own. I happen to overhear a row between the old man, in his eighties now, and his graying son. They are very angry at each other. ‘Your wife ran away with someone. You are fit for nothing,’ the son probes his fingers in the hurtful corner of the old man’s heart. ‘And your mother eloped with a goon,’ the old man countered. Then both of them turned silent under the weight of the family history.