A condolence gathering

 

In rural Haryana, to take anyone’s name properly is against the protocol. So Randhir becomes Dheere, meaning slow. But he is a quick and very agile dairy farmer. Wiry and fast. He is small but strong. He also washes the dead, puts them in new clothes, prepares arthi with bamboo and straw, and sees the dead on the last leg of their journey.

There is a condolence gathering. An old woman has died. They are talking about drinkers. All of them drink pretty heavily but those who drink throughout the day are considered the drunkard cases in the village society. The case they are discussing happened in a neighboring village. A young man passed out under the scorching rays of July sun after drinking too much. He was wearing just shorts. His once tanned brown strong body was found almost burnt black.

Dheere says that it would have been the same with Beere also. He saw him lying on the dusty field path outside the village, taking what he firmly believed to be the last painful breaths with painful jerks to his body. Dheere lies down on the ground and gives aching jerks to his body to give a demonstration of how he thought Beere was dying. Dheere waited under a nearby keekar so that he could take on his usual duties with the corpse. But then Beere stumped him. He got up, took cleaning swipes with his palms at his soiled pants and tottered ahead on the path of life, leaving all the yamdoots and bier-makers waiting and even annoyed.

Narender becomes Neender. He also is a part of the condolence gathering where they are discussing the matters of death so seriously. He also shares his quite recent close encounter with the guards of mortality. He is a fifty something stocky fellow. He got electrocuted while watering his iron-bodied cooler on the terrace. They found him senseless. The village quack doctor was called. He declared him dead. There was no pulse. That was all he knew about the matter and his set of injections and pills that he had assembled for common diseases wouldn’t serve anymore. He stepped aside with a sullen face expecting a full mourning blast by the family’s females.

Once the doctor said ‘no’ everybody clucked their tongue to nullify any plan to take him to the hospital at the earliest. ‘There is no use, he is gone!’ the unruly conglomerate around the supposedly dead man agreed in a loud chorus. Then a few chance words from a woman saved his life. ‘Put pressure on his chest and blow air into his mouth!’ a woman piped in with her enigma-injecting suggestion. She meant resuscitation. Two hefty ninety-kg fellows, at the peak of their rotund youth, got into the business. One fellow sat on Neender’s stomach and heavily pommelled his chest with his crude palms and fists. The other one blew blizzards of air to give him the hiss and kiss of life. It was a torrential action lasting a few minutes. Neender’s soul was sucked back into the body by the intense storm raised by the two youths. His ribs and muscles are aching now even after two weeks as the poignant symbols of their effort to defeat death from his portals. ‘They seemed bent upon killing me,’ he complains.

The Earth Overshoot Day

 

The Earth Overshoot Day is the day when we have used all that the ecosystem can replenish and regenerate in one year. On July 28, we have already consumed all that mother earth will be able to renew in a year. It means what mother earth generates in one year we eat it up in almost half of the time. So for the rest of the year we are borrowing from the natural coffers at the cost of future generations.

Mother earth’s bio-capacity is severely overstretched. As per the current consumption levels, it would take almost two earths to sustain us. There are countries that chuck out an entire year’s sustainable resources within just two-three months at the beginning of the year. For the rest of the year, they would be drawing from the deposited pool of resources, the pool that is diminishing rapidly and will surely go empty one day.

Well, I should abandon all gloomy thoughts born of these stats for the time being. An earthworm is not bothered either. After a spell of monsoon rain the earthworm seems all joyful.

The earth is all wet

and the earthworm is all set

to crawl to a new home.

 

It seems a huge effort by the earthworm to move. It has to stretch its length repeatedly and make a humpbacked U in the middle to stretch and bring forth the tail part by a few millimeters with each heave. An ant-swarm crawls out. The breakfast is almost steady, a slightly shifting breakfast it is to them. They would love to eat it alive. They have the numbers with them. Like the politicians have the numbers to eat our public money in one way or the other. There are hundreds of tiny bites. It wriggles with pain. I think we are like the ant-swarm and poor earth is like the earthworm. It’s wriggling with pain as we the human-swarm continue biting it non-stop, twenty-four hours a day and 365 days of the year.

The baloons

Of late, flavored condoms have hit sales to the ceilings in West Bengal’s Durgapur. The students have gone berserk. It should be encouraged if they are using contraceptives. But here poor condom is used not for love-making nasha. It’s used for a dangerous intoxication. It contains aromatic compounds that produce alcohol on breaking down. Condoms are soaked in hot water for long hours and the booze is ready. Once consumed it produces scores of health hazards but they are unseen and wait till they strike down the system. But for the time being they give a high and that’s what matters for the short-sighted modern generation.

Growing up in the eighties, we did free advertisements for the newly launched Nirodh. We inflated them to full size and left them floating in the air. The big balloons floated and scandalously spread the message of family control in the conservative society. But we had hardly any clue to the slap-stick advertisement. The elders gave scandalized, embarrassed looks. So in a way we carried free publicity for birth control on behalf of health and family welfare department. But most of the farmers were greedily griping misers as far as pleasure, the sole form of entertainment at night, was concerned. They won’t budge and give away the tiniest slice of pleasure by using the free-selling contraceptives. They found the thin barrier thicker than palace ramparts.

Journeyman, set up your Lagrange point!

 

In the infinite womb of the cosmos, the interplay of matter and energy churns out newer and newer formations, births and deaths of supermassive bodies. The cosmic churn goes on and on. Stars burst, black holes swallow supermassive bodies and galaxies heave massive pulses across the space. It’s basically a super-storm going around. Cosmic bodies pulling, repelling, orbiting, colliding, sucking and maybe many more phenomenon beyond our perception range. But there are little points of peace, balance and poise where there is equanimity and balance in this cosmic storm. These are Lagrange points or Libration points, the points of ‘equilibrium for small-mass objects under the gravitational influence of two massive orbiting bodies’.

Usually, two gigantic bodies put an unbalanced gravitational force at a specific point, thus changing the orbit of any small-bodied object present at that point. However, at the Lagrange points, the gravitational forces of the two massive bodies balance the centrifugal force exerted by each other. It results in little Lagrange points that can be used for space docking for satellites, because here they can float almost unchallenged by any force in one particular direction and hence decreasing the fuel requirements. The manmade space objects can be placed at these Lagrange points for observing the marvelous chaos unfolding around. The satellite is very stable at this point and like a meditative saint can marvel, observe and make a meaning of all this meaningless unfoldment going around.

Human life is also a tiny replica of the cosmic upheavals, shifts, transformations, collisions going at a bigger scale in the cosmos. There are forces that pull us down and curtail our flights just like the forces of gravity tend to crash the objects back onto the ground. These are the forces of discontentment, fear and insecurities that pull us back to the base level, cutting our wings. There are repelling forces as well that keep our real self away from the essential core of our pure being. These centrifugal forces are anger, hate, jealousy and judgments. And being either pulled or repelled by one or the other we have to spend a lot of fuel in cutting through the rough atmospherics and vicissitudes of life. We feel the wear and tear of this struggle against the opposing forces. We carry the scars, the discontentment and lots of dis-ease in our being. Life feels a burden as a result.

Luckily, in this rough journey we too have our Lagrange points just like the satellites. Every individual has his/her own Lagrange points, where the soul-ship can be docked in the balanced zone; where it requires minimum dissipation of life-force. Here we don’t feel the struggle of it. We feel the light of just ‘being’. We can feel the ease of just being. In this zone of equanimity and balance, we can set up ourselves with least conflicts and dissipation of energies. The contrasting forces here neutralize each other. A conflict-free existence naturally provides a lot of comfort to the soul.

Now the all-important question arises: How to find one’s very own Lagrange point? All of us have varying situations, circumstances, advantages, disadvantages, insecurities, fears, skills. All of us know the things that pull us down like the force of gravity. We also are aware of the repelling forces that keep our real self from coming face to face with the egoistic one. In my opinion the Lagrange points for a common person are the intersecting zones between materiality and spirituality—the zone between desires of the flesh and the dreams of the soul. One can set up a specific Lagrange point for one’s being and dock the soul-ship there to see, observe, witness all the drama going around, just like observatory satellites placed at Lagrange points do their job. This is the zone where the forces of materiality and immateriality are balanced by each other, allowing us to just be a celebrator of life, a witness of all this seemingly meaningless unfoldment around. Maybe we observe a meaning of life then. Wish you all a happy, cozy and safe Lagrange point in your life!

Uncaring children

 

Cultural anthropologists say that the human society functions on the principles of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘obligations’, both at the individual and collective levels. All our relationships work on the principle of ‘reciprocity’. You feel obliged, even indebted, if someone has done you a favor. If someone has given you something, helped you in some way, or even simply smiled at you, the inherent sense of obligation will firmly ask you to return the favor whenever possible in whatever form. Most of our likes and dislikes are based on what people have given us. If they have given us joy, we like them, love them, feel indebted, and return the favor. If they have given us pain, we return the same. But we hardly do the same in case of mother earth. We forget the principle of reciprocity and indebtedness. We just keep on taking and mother earth keeps giving. That is entirely slyly slanted, one-way process. What we give her back is extraordinarily miniscule (in terms of her health) in comparison to what we extract from her.

Just to show our fellow human beings low, we are drawing longer lines of achievement by their side. The fire of competition persistently burning. The planet crashing like a fiery meteorite. We have already chucked out most of the attractive, holistic heritage that fell into our entitlement. We have taken mother nature for granted and the consequences are plainly scattered around for us to see. Her grievous moanings are no faint ripples anymore. These are piercing cries. Hear them!