Vrindavan Verve

 Vrindavan Verve...

A poet's walk through countryside solitude

 

Celosia argentea or Plumed cockscomb blooms in a corner. A bit of sunshine, dewy moisture, cool breeze and no human foot intruding...and mother nature offers a lovely bouquet of smiles to a solitary walker with poetic sensitivities...we humans might consider them as weeds but they are a perfect breakfast table for a flock of moths who are high on nectar..

A lonely tree...must be missing the company of its brothers...it will be a world when trees will be barcoded and numbered. No worries... let's make the most of what is left... thankfully we are the generation that is lucky to see unnumbered and uncoded trees.

Golden shades of ripe paddy...a prelude to nice, luscious aroma on your table.

There is light everywhere and darkness alongside...you have to position yourself in life to have your portion of light rays and your little puddle of shadow..

A flycatcher's dressing table

 

It’s Diwali, the festival of lights. The two parijat trees in the yard carpeted the earth below with so many flowery drops as to cover the entire yard. What celebration! The rains have been good and plants, especially tulsi, have acquired a bushy jungle shape. The tailorbird parents have their hatchling out, a greenish tailless funny guy almost as big as its parents. It hops around the leafy tangle during its post-nest training phase. It’s a mischievous guy. I saw it running after a good-behaved elderly Indian robin.

Everything is perception-based at this level of existence. So this particular section of the yard is their house, just like I have the same perception due to being born in the house. They deny my entry to their section. They raise a brain-hole-drilling din the moment I reach the spot. The wire-tail swallow couple does the same. They are agile fighter-plane type fliers. They dart with chipping sounds, coming dangerously close to my head whenever I happen to be near their mud nest on the ceiling in the barn verandah. I understand their position. We are also darting around with angry chipping sounds, insecure and afraid of losing our position, interests and stakes.

The white-browed fantail flycatcher is a distinguished bird having a white forehead with a black strip running from top to the nape, blackish top and milky white underside. It’s very lively and flicks and spreads its white-edged tail quite frequently. With its long broad white eyebrows, it flits around almost tirelessly. Flaunting white spots on its throat, it fans its tail, flicks its wings, giving quick hunting dashes midair. Fleas beware! It’s wonderful to have a pair of flycatchers in your yard. I love them for their midair antics and lively attitude. They look playing all through the day. They consume so much energy due to this tireless physical activity that the entire day is spent in catching fleas midair. Can I ask for more? Make your hobby your profession. Like they do their mid air antics while going with the profession of survival—playing and gathering food going side by side.

There is an icing on the cake as well—they aren’t too scared of my presence. Their confiding nature allows me to stand a few feet away and enjoy their fun as a spectator. Then there is cherry on top of icing—their song. It’s a melodious song comprising 6 to 8 notes, ascending, sometimes descending. Sometimes they stop it midway, leaving you craving for the entire performance.

Both of them look the same but with the spirit of an ornithologist one can spot the difference—the female is slightly paler with browner head, while the male is black with greenish gloss. I had to do a bit of research to find out which of them is doing this tireless exercise in front of the little old car parked into retirement in the yard. No wonder it happens to be the girl in the pair! Who else loves a mirror so much? The car is 21 years old and deserves graceful retirement as a vintage souvenir in the yard of a small-time rural poet. After all, it was with me during the challenging and complex cluster of life and events during my urban innings in editorial jobs. With our limited capabilities, both of us suited each other really well. Now it becomes the dressing table for the female flycatcher. She is such a narcissist. She spends her days ogling at her reflection in the glasses. It’s a rural set-up, so there is no problem of food, I mean fleas. Human to fleas ration is infinitely in favor of the latter. She can continue ogling coquettishly at her reflection and take little bites of food as fleas naturally happen to be within the range of her dressing table, dressing car rather. Such tireless flapping of wings requires lots of food. It means less fleas in the yard of a poet. I note that she drops her extras quite frequently. So cleaning the bird drops on my little souvenir at the day end is the service charge I have to pay.

She thus is a homely girl. Her husband, as can be expected, goes outside to loaf around. But he returns quite frequently to check on her. When he disturbs her dressing-car time she gives an angry, agitated, grating chuck…chuck…chuck…chuckrr reprimand. The moment he starts disturbing her self-loving ogling at her reflection, she throws these irritated notes and shifts to the other vehicle, a bit new and a tiny bit bigger than the one, which seems to be her favorite. I hope she isn’t fed up with this guy—or suspects him of double dating during his sorties outside the yard—and has fallen under the illusion that a handsome prince is imprisoned inside the car and thus goes calling from all sides, asking it to come out.

Leela

 The zero. The imperfect. The perfect. Three basic concepts which the mind can hypothesize in trying to understand the cosmic equation. The imperfect is forever striving to become the perfect. That's the basic functional element in the play of existence, the Leela. The imperfect running timelessly and endlessly after the perfect becomes the infinity. Infinity is just the ever-persistent, eternal impulse of the finite to become perfect. And perfection is impossible because one point of apparent perfection is just a transient state, a mere beginning of a new stage of the imperfect looking to further its path to perfection.  The flow. And infinity collapses to zero, the empty.

Winters changing to summers

 

It’s February 21 and the maximum temperature already 31 degrees. In a decade or so the winters will turn spring and a few more decades down the line it will be an all summer affair. Well that’s change. And it lies there in the future. As of now there are still wild flowers along the little solitary path. This is more important than what is not available or what we will be missing in the future.

The spring is stalled and there is a beacon of summer or rather beacons of summer—numbering three. Three black stray dogs are coming at a trot and their red flashy tongues are hanging out, saliva shakings to the tunes of rapidly approaching summer. I have taught one of them a nice lesson. As I stroll around the countryside, dozens of stray dogs would bark at my intrusion. Then due to many reasons, such as getting used to my presence, amply aided by my soft cuddling words, they learnt to ignore me. All of them except one. This guy kept hollering at me daily without any provocation, despite the softest of my words. It made me feel like a thief in the broad daylight. It would be particularly aggressive, almost on the verge of biting me, whenever the farm owner, around whose fields it had marked its territory, would be present. It wanted to show its loyalty. Having exhausted all the means of bringing peace between us, I resorted to the last avenue. It required only this much. I had to change my lazy stroll to a blizzard of dash like an Olympics sprinter. This I did to good effect with a stick in my hand, raising a big hullaballoo along the way. Out of wits, the dog went rocketing over the planted wheat. I gave the chase to the capacity of my legs and lungs. I collapsed on the ground to recover my breath but luckily the animosity in the dog had also collapsed. After that it started respecting me. It would give me way and moved to the side as I approached. I think in handling incorrigible chaps a reasonable use of force is needed. Too much of generosity and elegance in behavior is taken for granted, is interpreted as weakness, and then even stray dogs won’t take you seriously.

There was this little piece of land covered with eucalypts trees, the ground covered with shrubbery and bushes giving a dense second canopy. It looked a little dot of refuge for wilderness among the well-manicured, tamed farm lands around. A little wild hovel for cats, rats, jackals, reptiles and birds. The farmer has sold it. It’s a clear skyline now. There is sadness in the air. But we cannot blame the farmer. He must have had his own reasons to cut it. But at least for a decade and half his trees gave oxygen to us and some wild space for the species that are losing their rights on mother earth.

I palpably miss the presence of those threes in the countryside. It feels like one more step towards swathes and swathes of treeless avenues where mechanized human systems would forge a new civilization completely unrelated to the raw forces of nature. A new species altogether. But isn’t that change? Didn’t dinosaurs become extinct? So, does it matter too much if we also become extinct some day and are replaced by a half-mechanized, artificially nurtured new super-species that will have the poor few—who will remain the same old homo sapiens due to their poverty and limited circumstances—homo sapiens of old blood, bones and capacities, either as zoo specimen or at the most as poor household servants. Change is the ultimate master.