Selfie with a cobra

 A few years back we had lots of selfies with a cobra. I know most of you would term it as a bigoted banishment of the common sense. A cobra obviously isn’t an obliging, fake-smiling celebrity to gratify the demands of perky fans. Its anger has a lot of reach and range. In addition it has lots of attitude and arrogance which has a high chance of not adjusting to the demands of a selfie. But then it was a tired cobra, like an old aristocrat sitting among the ruins of his palace in an era of crumbling feudalism. Moreover, it was full of gratitude as we had done it a big favor. I would say that it was a mature reptile because it found itself bound to oblige us with a selfie in lieu of the favor done to it.

The cobra had fallen into a deep well. After two-three days of tiring drudgery to stay afloat, the seething spirit to hiss and bite ebbed down to the lowest point and there it lay like an almost dead rope. My cousin tied a neem bough to a rope and dropped the anchorage for the tired, sulking cobra. Forgetting all the malignant elements of the dangerous equations between the reptiles and humans, it got onto the bough and coiled itself safely among the branches. It was then hauled out and was cheered and applauded by the fans outside. It acknowledged the presence of the rescue party with its tired but taut hood. As a reciprocation for the act of kindness, it didn’t let out blasting, hissing sounds. It was so tired that it won’t get off the branch, taking it to be the ultimate savior. So we picked up the bough and had lots of selfies with the condescending cobra. It just stared at us with a mysteriously concerned curiosity. After an extended booming and euphoric selfie session, we put down the branch among some bushes, and suddenly it came out of its hypnotization and quickly came to life and dashed away at full speed. Maybe it was a wise cobra who knew the value of the favor done to it and rewarded us with some fan moments. 

The beginning of Summers

 It’s the burning first week of April. The short-lived spring is more of flowery symbolism, a very delicate metamorphosis, far more in allegory than substance. In future it will be remembered through the poetic approbation of sundry sensitive souls. Gusts of wind loop around with a thirsty probity. Once out of the winters, the roses have given their best. They had ravishing, oracular dew-laden smiles to fulfill their commitment to the short-lived spring. Now they get some respite at night. But during the day the 40°C sun soaks away life and smile from the roses that still try to keep their smiles. It’s a slow-burning pyre now and they lose their color rapidly, the petals get crinkled.

A few pots of petunias have unleashed a rainbow of red, pink and violet. They are lucky to be placed by a wall where they have to see through the scorching sun till noon only. After that there is shade and the sun-beaten, bowed down, drooping flowers slowly regain their smiles as the afternoon approaches. They recover completely at night to smile at their best, all fresh, and welcome me with innocent fresh smiles in the morning before the sunrise. The little sadabahar flower in the crack in the wall has welcomed spring with high spirits. It has grown taller to be around one foot and has a cluster of little purple flowers. The thin crack in the plaster is its lifeline. Acknowledging and honoring its formidable willpower to survive, I sprinkle a handful of water around the crack. It’s just enough to moisten its lips but it seems enough to help it keep smiling. For sure it looks happy in its little world.

I look solemnly as the short-lived spring gets sucked dry by the thirsty sunrays. One must have sympathetic eyes to witness the fading signals of the retreating spring. Three butterflies go gamboling in the air, flirting with the eddies as if out on a pleasure party, going to dine on a few discharmed, sun-ravaged flowers that still keep their posts for their patron season. These are creamy white butterflies. I hope it isn’t a naughty play—a colorful threesome demonstration. What is a butterfly, I ask myself musing over them. It’s just the air taking colorful wings and fly around in a form so that we can see it.

A ladybird has fulfilled its quota of representing the air. It’s an illustrious form of earth now—orange with black dots. It’s a beautiful pattern in the soil as I sit by it to pay homage to a life that completed its journey. Well, the dead need to be honored. I pick it up on a leaf and leave it to turn to common soil in a safe corner among the still remaining flowers.

These are the times for the triumph of ‘extremes’. As extreme heat builds up, the sunburnt roses give a sad sight. The hot wind swipes its airy hand and scores of dry leaves tumble down. A green ladybug also tumbles over. As someone who is trying to keep his eyes grounded for smaller things in life, there I find it kicking its legs in the air. All it gives him is a backstroke movement on the ground. It may look good in a swimming pool but on the ground this expert maneuver gives scratches on one’s back. With the help of a dead leaf—everything happens for a cause; maybe the leaf fell near the ladybug to avail the services of my fingers to save the little colorful insect—I help it turn over and there it goes showing its beautiful back and scampers into the security of some plants.

The ladybug has to be thankful for not being spotted by the forlorn magpie robin who goes flying restlessly in the locality. There is plenty of urge for love despite the heat. But there are more claimants (takers) of love than givers. No wonder there is a shortage of love which has come to acquire the shape of a commodity these days. The ladybug was lucky in having an extended backstroke swimming exercise on the ground because the garden magpie robin has been busy in fighting for love at that time. He is fighting with a rival. They pinned each other on the ground, locking each other in a wrestler’s hold so forcefully that they didn’t move at all for at least two minutes. They are lucky that a cat isn’t around otherwise the love game would be the end game. The lady in contention looks curiously from a distance. They are a couple, I think. Our magpie robin is unnecessarily trying to snatch away the rival’s girlfriend. It seems to be fed up with its lonely nights on the parijat tree and decides to fight for a better half at any cost.

The purple sunbird couple is usually seen flitting among the trees and plants in the garden with their prodigiously arduous chipping notes. They are extremely chatty birds and are impassively in pursuit of each other from branch to branch. Either there is too much love or too much domestic bickering between them. There is a limitless barrage of swish-swish-swish-swish notes, a kind of rolling ruckus that startles even the noisy tailorbird. I’m not sure whether the couple is adherent of the religion of love or advocate of husband-wife animosity. But these spurts of either anger or love cooings peter out after brief intervals. It’s very challenging to maintain either love or hate at an intensified, pointed peak. People get tired of their hyper-excitement and come downslope, mostly on opposite ones. I would say it’s better to come down the same slope with experience and an understanding that staying in the clouds is too much asking. Be realistic. Don’t drift away, just come down to the level plain. You won’t be alone at least. Coming to the birds, if it’s a quarrel then they are drifting apart after tasting the peak of togetherness. If these are love songs, let’s see how long they maintain the tempo.

The game of love unfolds on an unusual and inexplicable chessboard. The pawns, we humans and even animals, birds and reptiles, are shuffled around for hits and misses, for brief pleasures and long pains, by an unknown hand that sits on the playing seat with unremitting zeal, playing for both ends, being victor and loser both with the same sadistic excitement. Love: toughest in philosophy to understand and simplest in feeling. As of now, it seems so simple in lovely companionship of a mynah couple. The top end of an electricity pole is their place of dating and the time is late in the evening when the sun has lost its sting. It has been a week since they have been arriving to meet on this tiny square at the top end of the electricity pole. They relax in close proximity and let out beautiful foundational notes. Brahminy mynah is a very talkative bird and they have a wide assortment of notes to converse in their birdie language. They must be having wonderful tales containing descriptions of the unobvious.

With broadening connotations of our taming spirits, confidently holding the hangman’s noose to tame the darkness on the surface, we are throwing beams to light up the stage for our ever-unfolding mind-work of creation and destruction. The village has street lights now. As I stand on the terrace at night, I can see the unfolding spectacle of our beams pursuing the darkness. And darkness seems to be retreating under the baffling barrage of our lights. But then maybe it’s creeping inside, vacating its posts on the outside, giving us a false sense of victory and is seeping through our skins to take a counteroffensive position in our hearts.

Well, I remember perfectly dark nights, real nights, in the village during our childhood. The streets were completely dark and the simple houses fought the dark with flickering oil lamps. And now we are fighting against the nights to have 24-hour days on earth. We may lose our nights altogether due to light pollution. Lights hold the enduring legacy of our stepping out of dark caves to enter the un-blushing charm of the brightly lit palaces of convenience and comfort. Lights, lights everywhere: street lights, bazaar lights, vehicle headlights, mast lights, blazing skyscrapers, fiery rockets, lights-lights and more lights. Now even oceanic depths are disturbed. The unshaded light flies off into the sky only to be scattered back by the clouds, gases and dust molecules in the atmosphere. The LED lights are bright but glow at the blue end of the spectrum. It gives them more penetration into darkness. In future when urban centers will dot all nook corners on earth, we will have far milder nights or maybe not altogether. Work-life balance rapidly falling in favor of work, the unsparing work culture will welcome endless days. China, cringing with egregious cynicism, in fact is trying to develop an artificial sun to keep blazing 24-hour non-stop over a city. A scenario of ‘no nights’ is highly likely and plausible in future. Just light, light and more light. Then darkness will be sold like bottled water is sold presently. We will have doses of darkness in closed chambers as remedies for the diseases born of too much light. 

A little pilgrimage

 There is an open large sewage drain, the mother drain of all the smaller sewage drains and nullahs, in the town. It flows with its black, stinking sludge. An eliminatory canal taking away the waste and refuge emanating from the overworked urban bowels. People grimace and cover their noses as they pass near it. But this impurity is what defines the purity of holy waters. There are little temples nearby. Here the people enter, open their soul and breathing to the incense smoke in front of the idols. 

I walked for a considerable length by the big open sewage nullah. It's a strong smell. The smell of our stress, pain and struggles. Of overburdened humanity. Of mass transformation of life into mere struggle. I love walking by holy rivers. But this also is an avatar of mother stream. The all-accepting avatar of primordial mother who is happy to accept all the dump Her children put on her. A mother unbothered about the urine and shit dumped on her by the infant child. My head spins due to the strong odor after 15 minutes. But this also is a little pilgrimage for Maa's blackened avatar. She is smiling even with all her filth. But she is after all the very same mother whose divinity flows in crystal clear mountain streams. As I move away it seems like a little pilgrimage I have performed.

The last prehistoric kingdom on earth

Far away from the Indian mainland in the watery expanses of the Bay of Bengal lies the last outpost of the prehistoric times. A tiny place where the world is still exactly as it was 50000 years ago with a few minor exceptions. It’s a little island named North Sentinel Island, a little earthen dot in the lap of sea measuring 60 square kilometers in area with an approximately squarish outline. It’s inhabited by a prehistoric tribe called Sentinelese.

Let’s call it the Kingdom of Sentinelese. The prehistoric kingdom’s population is estimated to be about 50 to 200. Its seashore is roughly 50 meters wide. It’s bordered with littoral forests which lead to dense tropical evergreen forest. Its citizens are hunter-gatherers who use bows and arrows, collect seafood, wear bark strings on their handsome black nakedness and carry daggers in string waist-belts as a mark of confidence and courage. Their homes are poorly contrived huts having leaf-covered roofs. And in brush with the other-worldly civilization they scavenge for metal that washes ashore—to them it must be just like any other offering by father sea—to make tools, spears and metal-tipped arrows with it to go for hunting pigs on the land and making canoes for lagoon fishing. Imagine they must be thinking the metal is a produce of the sea just like fish!

There is no clue about their language. It’s primarily based on lots of gesticulations, exclamations and body movements. They are happy in their world and aren’t interested in interacting with the outer world.

Their history, in our chronological terms, starts in 1771 when an East India Company’s hydrographic survey vessel, the Diligent, observed ‘a multitude of lights…upon the shore’. It happens to be the old civilization’s first brush with history.

Wars and battles are defined in proportion to the level of upheavals they carry for the geography, lifestyle and population of a particular place, region or country. So the tiny isolated place with its tiny prehistoric population has a right to term its minute skirmishes with the outer world as wars and battles because they shake the very roots of their existence.

The Battle of October 1867: An Indian merchant vessel named Nineveh got stranded on a reef off the coast of the North Sentinel Island. The passengers and the crew landed on the prehistoric kingdom’s beach. On the third day as they lazily started their breakfast, there was an assault by a group of naked, short-haired, red-painted inhabitants. It was a confident breezy assault. The Sentinelese bowmen forced the ship’s captain to escape in a boat. The defeated head of the rival army was later rescued by a brig. The Royal Navy sent a rescue of party. They took all the survivors on board. Thankfully the stranded crew had somehow managed to repel the attackers with sticks and stones. There were no fatal casualties on both sides apart from cuts, wounds and sore throats born of constant shouting and cuss words. As the civilized man departed from their primitive shores, the Sentinelese must have celebrated their first victory over the enemy coming from the wombs of the sea in their strange vessels.

The Assault of 1880: It was more organized and target-oriented encroachment by the outsiders. Andaman and Nicobar’s colonial administrator Naurice Vidal Portman—who had his own administrative reasons to scout the island falling within his jurisdiction—arrived on the shore with an armed group of convict-orderlies, Europeans and Andamanese trackers from other indigenous groups who had been brought under the yoke of ‘civilization’. It was big and a well-organized army this time. The islanders fled the scene. So that would go as a shameful defeat in the annals of their history. After days of futile search they caught an elderly man, woman and four children. So that accounts for first mass kidnapping of its citizens—given their tiny population. Away from home and exposed to strange diseases, the elderly man and the woman died but the children somehow survived. The colonial administrator sent back the children with gifts from the other world. I’m sure strange myths and legends would have spun in the prehistoric kingdom based on what the children saw ‘outside’ and the things brought with them. Maybe certain stories, including strange Gods and demons based on these experiences, do the rounds among the tiny group. Or maybe particular descendants of those returned children would claim more privileged status in the tribal society because their ancestors fought their way back from the enemy from the sea.

The triumph of 1896: A convict escaped from the penal colony on the Great Andaman island using a makeshift raft. The lone runaway landed on the North Sentinelese beach. This time it was easy for the defending army. He was easily slayed. In the coming years they successfully accomplished arrow piercings and throat cutting with odd convicts who landed on their shore by sheer bad luck. I’m sure the Sentinelese bowman whose arrows killed these unfortunate convicts must have claimed a heroic status in local myth and folklore.

In between, various British colonial administrators landed on the beach—not with the intention to rout and kill them altogether because had they wished it, it could have been done easily—with the purpose of academic research and a keen sense of curiosity, almost like searching for a new animal species in the forest. The prehistoric tribesmen would retreat into the inner parts after shooting arrows and angry gesticulations. And when the research parties went back to the other part of the cosmos, i.e., the sea, they must have felt proud of their natural fortification and would have imagined that the enemy retreated because of the fear of their arrows and spears.

After independence, the Indian government declared the island a tribal reserve for anthropological research and studies. So they are protected under the Indian law. The Indian coast guard maintains an armed patrol to prohibit travel within three nautical miles off the prehistoric shores. During their protecting patrols the Indian coast guards have taken photos of naked men aiming arrows at them. The kingdom of the Sentinelese have every reason to believe that they are continuously warding off the enemy with their sticks, stones, bows and spears who dare not come onshore to meet them in a battle. Well, isn’t our imagination bound by the extent of our knowledge? They must be having regular watch posts and parties to ward off the enemy who are their protectors in reality. If not for them there would be intruders and a little party with automatic weapons would destroy the prehistoric kingdom. But this assumption that their strict vigil parties keep the patrol parties away must have given rise to a rudimentary system of army, posts, watch parties. What a way to keep busy on the bases of imagined realities! We too are doing the same, by the way—at a bigger scale though. Who knows a far more advanced and evolved form of life somewhere in the cosmos has declared us to be a tiny reserve to protect us and watch with amusement all the savage antics going on our small place? The UFOs might actually be the space patrols—like Indian navy patrols around the tiny island to protect it—to keep the intruders away. And just like the Sentinelese are happy in warding off the outsiders, we too are beating our chests with pride for having defended our place so bravely.  

The Battle of 1974: A National Geographic team approached the island to a make a documentary. The chief modus operandi was to give them gifts to earn their trust. As the motorboat broke through the surrounding barrier reef and entered their calm fishing lagoon the Sentinelese advance guard launched a barrage of arrows. The crew but landed at a safe beach. They left behind an interesting assortment of gifts—a plastic toy car to catch the fancy of some prehistoric kid, a live pig to make their mouth water, a doll to arise the fancy of some little girl and aluminum cookware to tickle the kitchen nerves in a woman. They responded very wisely. They launched a fresh barrage of arrows. One of the arrows hit the documentary director in his thigh. The man who had hit the director proudly laughed from behind a tree. Others speared the pig and buried it with the doll. But they took away coconuts and kitchenware. God knows what will they do with the utensils! But it was a handsome victory. The Sentinelese bravado had once again saved the motherland. The brave man who had injured the enemy commander must have been given extra coconuts as war booty that day. And these little-little victories against the small parties of outsiders must have acquired the bloody proportions of pitched battles won with lots of efforts and bravery. I’m glad that they aren’t aware of million strong armies, automatic guns, artillery, tanks, fighter jets and nuclear weapons. Our reality seems to be framed on the basis of what we ‘don’t’ know. 

Famed anthropologist TN Pandit is known for his pioneer work among the indigenous tribal groups scattered over various islands in Andaman and Nicobar. Many hitherto untouched tribals agreed to his gentle, friendly touch. He slowly, silently crept into their little world and danced exuberantly with bare-breasted Jarawa tribe women. He acted as a scholarly bridge between the so-called the civilized and the so-called primitive man. The untouched tribals would dance with him, take off his clothes, examine his anatomy to find similarities between the outsider and and themselves. The Jarawas slowly got assimilated in the society. Then Jarawa women started giving birth to the babies of the settlers. They picked up clothes, dropped their bows and arrows (and their raw pride and freedom with it). Their raw dignity and freedom was gone. Many were turned to beggars or mere showpieces for the tourists to marvel at. But these are the spin-offs of modernity. The earth has to turn a mono-culture, and primitiveness chucked off from everywhere. But at least it is preserved still in a little island far off in the Bay of Bengal.

Mr Pandit led many academic attempts to connect with the Sentinelese between 1967 and 1991. He knew how to connect with the aborigines and had won the trust of many raw, animalistic tribes of the region. But the Sentinelese were the toughest to approach. They always wanted to retain their prehistoric ethos. Mr. Pandit made several friendly expeditions in 1980s and early 1990s. Maybe the fair Kashmiri Pandit definitely carried some raw prehistoric fragrance in him which allowed him to win the trust of many other indigenous tribal groups. He would leave gifts on the shore. It was a shaky love-hate contact. Sometimes they would throw away the gifts into the sea, shouting, aiming arrows, flashing their genitals at the boats reading them through telescopes from a distance. Sometimes they waved and took  few of the gifts and leaving the rest. Sometimes they turned their backs to show a defecating gesture. It was a kind of no-welcome gesture; maybe a type of message that we take a dump at your civilized society. Sometimes they would start swaying their penis, as if proclaiming their utter freedom, thus challenging the civilized man to do the same.

Then arrived the first soft brace of the old with the new. January 4, 1991. Perhaps it would go down as the ancient society’s brief truce with the enemy. The first touch! Very tentative though. A young woman named Madhumala Chattopadhyay was part of the scholarly expedition. Maybe they found a woman’s presence assuring. She seemed to have convinced them that there was no danger. As a symbol of ceasefire a Sentinelese woman fighter pushed her arrow down on the beach sand. A man followed by burying his weapon on the beach as a symbolic gesture of holding fire. They approached the scholarly party without their weapons. Coconuts were distributed hand-to-hand, the outsiders in their boat and the islanders in the sea walking towards the boat in neck deep waters. It turned a gift, not a charity throwaway like earlier. Maybe Mr Pandit and Ms Madhubala appeared to them having saintly touch. The islanders must have named them favorably as some reincarnation of their deities. Further expeditions without Mr Pandit were not met with friendly bearing. Maybe they still remember Mr Pandit as a friendly man from across the seas. Then the government of India closed all voluntary approach methods to reach out to the islanders, leaving them in peace to preserve their prehistoric ways. The Sentinelese army must be basking in pride for having finally defeated the enemy from the waters because they no longer bother them.  

The Sentinelese must have a name for their world, for their kingdom. That isn’t known to us. But for our convenience, an official surveying party fixed a stone tablet on a disused stone hearth to declare it a part of India. Maybe a far more intelligent and developed life form has left a similar tablet claiming earth as its territory, while all of us quibble on the small place like the Sentinelese must be doing, thinking all their existence is guaranteed because they can fight with their arrows. While in reality maybe we are merely left as a little prehistoric dot of earth for academic amusement and anthropological interest by a far-far advanced life-form.

Sentinelese expedition and exploration of the outside world (1981): On August 2, 1981, a cargo-ship named MV Primrose laden with chickenfeed from Bangladesh and bound for Australia ran aground off the island. After a few days the captain gave a distress call for firearms. It was the first organized takeover attempt of an enemy object by the prehistoric tribe. About fifty islanders prepared their boats to take over the ship. They launched the attack. Luckily strong winds deflected their arrows and prevented their canoes from reaching the ship. The thirty-one member crew held off the invaders with axes, pipes, flare guns and lots of cuss words and abuses which come very handy during wartimes. A civilian helicopter evacuated them after a week. The tribal army must have felt jubilant seeing the enemy flying away scared of their arrows in their strange vehicle. The shipwreck lay about 90 meters from the shore. Of course now it was a war booty item for the aborigines. They triumphantly got onto the abandoned vessel and scoured it for metal pieces to upgrade the next version of their modern army, the metal-tipped arrows and spears. Far away in the outside world, a dealer won a contract to dismantle the ship. This work would last for about 18 months. Maybe at this period of time the Sentinelese army was led by their bravest general so far. He must have acquired cult proportion in the society because under him they were going out to face the enemy instead of defending from their fortress. Two or three days after the work began, at low tide, the contractor saw three canoes bearing around 12 Sentinelese brave-hearts about 50 feet from the shipwreck. He offered truce over the war booty. As a signal of adjusting their claim on the vessel, which they thought to have won after a battle, he offered bananas. The brave soldiers accepted the tribute of submission and came overboard and began to take what they thought they had won after the last battle—the smallest pieces of metal scrap to modernize their army, leaving the rest for the enemy from the sea. They visited twice or thrice every month while the dismantling work progressed.

The doomsday of 2004 (Tsunami): It must have been their day of pralaya when the existence burst and a new phase started after it. There were tectonic changes to the island. It got enlarged after merger with small islands. The sea floor got raised by 1.5 meters. The coral reefs were exposed to air thus destroying their fishing lagoons. The government of India carried out aerial expeditions to provide help and assess their casualties. There must have been deaths for sure but many had survived as viewed by the flying choppers. But the survivors turned hostile and aimed arrows at the reconnoitering helicopters. I think they imagined this catastrophe as the handiwork of the enemy from the sea, who having failed in all its earlier attempts to defeat them now launched some watery attack to annihilate them.

Taking revenge on the enemy soldiers (2006): A fishing boat carrying two Indian fishermen drifted off into the shallows near the Sentinelese kingdom. They were killed, their bodies put on stakes facing the sea. It was a stronger message for the outsider enemy. They must have thought that the enemy was trying to snoop on their debilitated strength after the Tsunami strike. A helicopter sent to take away the bodies was pelted with arrows. They won’t take any chance with the enemy anymore.

The war again organized religion (2018): Chau, a trained American Christian missionary entered the prehistoric kingdom illegally without any permit from the kingdom’s unseen protector, the state of India. He paid money to the local fishermen to take him 500-700 meters off the Sentinelese coast and then continued alone in a canoe. On his first approach he received a hostile reaction to his gifts. As his diaries would later elaborate, another time they received him with a ‘mixture of amusement, bewilderment and hostility’. He sang worship songs and tried to converse with them in Xhoba (some basic tribal language spoken among the so-called civilized tribes in the Andaman and Nicobar group). They would giggle, and made high-pitched sounds and gestures. His last letter says that when he tried to give fish and other gifts, a boy shot a metal-headed arrow which pierced the Bible he was holding in front of his chest. What a clear statement! We aren’t for any organized religion here! The fishermen looking from a distance last saw his body being dragged on the shore. An attempt to retrieve his body was aborted. I think the graves of the few people like him must be serving as the proof of annihilation of the enemy who came to conquer them.

This is the history of the last prehistoric kingdom on earth. I think that’s how myths, histories and legends develop at a larger scale as well on the earth in its various parts. Our assumed reality seems to be framed by our ignorance.

Reading the book of life

 Passing through a poor locality in Delhi is always revealing. To feel gratitude for whatever God has given us, we ought to visit slums and pavements crowded with the homeless people. Then we realize how lucky we have been in receiving all that God has given us. To feel gratitude for whatever bodytype God has made us, thus blessing us with a vehicle to complete this phase of journey, sometimes visit the hospitals and see the sick and diseased. It helps us in feeling thankful for whatever Almighty has gifted us in the name of physicality.

 Alittle kid, barely 7 or 8 comes pulling the rickshaw carrier. Empty plastic cans at the back and the little lad just going almost half way down on each side to complete the paddling circle. More child bread earners washing dirty plates by a kulche chhole stall. It is early in the morning and instead of getting breakfast before going to school they are earning their bread. Littlest of kids taking a bath at a public tap after a late night stint at the eating point. Childhoodhad has withered in them. They are old before they realize. These are dhaba boys. Getting their skins hardened with heartless, unsympathetic, antisocial strains...fed by the scorns and abuses of their merciless masters. Watching them makes us feel so privileged in having parents that saved us from all this experience, who gave us schooling, shelter and made us free enough to pursue our journey. Watching the miseries around should open us to kindness. But it should open the floodgates of gratitude also for whatever we have received just by being born in relatively better circumstances. If you have a personal jet, watch people who have just cars. If you have a car, feel the struggle of those having just bikes. If you have bike, feel the test someone is going through in just having a bicycle. If you have a bicycle, see the homelss walker who hasn't anything at all. If you ever feel sorry for your poor footwear, feel the pain of someone who hasn't got even legs to wear even the poorest of a footwear. And millions will die today over the globe. So feel privileged to have this sip of life under the fresh sunshine. Gratitude is very very important. Without it we cannot groom self-love. And without the foundations of self-love we face a lot of challenge in building the citadel of love for others. All of us know it theoretically but we forget it easily. To make gratitude an essential element of our daily life we ought to look below as well, daily, to make it a habit. Look above daily to remember the impermanence of life by watching the shifting and melting clouds. And daily look below to feel gratitude for great boons we have received during this interval between birth and death. There are messages written around. Ahha, the masterbook of life! The codes of ultimate reality are written so clearly for everyone to read. Happy watching above and below--daily.