Still More Agonies

It started with the buzzword Corona in faraway China. It now establishes a firm foot in our history as Sars-CoV-2 causing the corona virus disease (Covid-19). As it ravages India in mid June, destroying all our hollow sense of victory that we derived from the number game that was somehow kept low due to the lockdown, all we can do is to take statistical help—like earlier, for we don’t have any other means as of now—in creating some artificial pride. At 2.9%, India’s fatality rate is lower than the world’s at 5.5%. Currently, Covid numbers have hijacked all sense of loss and victory, wellness and unwellness, growth and decay, and development and regression.

The politicians must have felt almost imprisoned, for they survive on sloganeering crowds. They are further spared their lung power as they prepare for election campaigning through virtual rallies. I wonder, screens may become more familiar than human faces.

The pandemic is in full rendezvous in India after the ease in lockdown. Everybody appears limping back to business, thoroughly battered and bruised. The old normal tries to stamp its sovereignty as people push and jostle like earlier. The new normal however has to be accepted. The world has changed. The Indian government has taken a gutsy step to lift the lockdown even when the curve is moving towards the peak. Let’s see where it leads to. Economy had to be discharged from its home quarantine because we had gone into the lockdown a bit early. And in the world we are acquainted with, money is more important than food, water and oxygen.

The disease is currently ravaging through thickly populated urban centers of Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. About, 60% of the cases are traced in Delhi, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu alone. Let’s see how do we cope with the coming peak of infections during the monsoon season. The infrastructural shortcomings which are grossly visible even during normal times will surely acquire horrible shapes during such emergencies.  

With the financial nerve-centre and the political backbone of the country lying seized by the virus the situation is indeed grim.     

The hospital situation has turned worse. Bodies have been left unclaimed by many families. It shows not everyone living under the same roof is a real family. Critically ill patients, gasping for breath like fish without water, are falling at the thresholds of hospitals and still not being admitted. Forget about poor people, well presented middle class people have been denied test and treatment matter of factly by many hospitals. Cremation grounds and graveyards are falling short of space to complete the last rites. Crematoriums have said no to cremate the bodies of dead Corona patients. These are the people who have decent medical insurance coverage, some even have still better benefits of central government health schemes, but still hospitals after hospitals are denying them admittance. One can very well imagine the condition of the poor who don’t even have such support on paper at least.

Covid-19 patients are literally left to die or recover of their own in hospitals. It’s utterly callous and insensitive. The bodies are left among the patients in the wards for many hours. On paper, you have no shortage of beds and medical facilities, but in reality there is chronic shortage of even the basic necessities. Sick elderly, cancer patients, pregnant women and sufferers of other lesser disease (non-Corona) are made to feel like they are healthy and normal requiring no healthcare facility.

The government hasn’t yet capped the Corona treatment fees of private hospitals, so they build big mounds of cash as the frenzy and terror about being testing positive builds up. An unbearable medical bill is a still larger calamitous event—bigger than any disease known—for the majority of Indians. Video grabs show how callously doctors treat the patients like they are pariah dogs. The stigma of a disease remains like it was hundreds of years back. Typhoid Mary (Mary Mallson) the asymptomatic Typhoid carrier captured and treated like the biggest evil doer, African-Americans supposed to be carriers of syphilis earlier and Aids, and of course the bell-carrier leprosy patients of ancient times who had to warn others of their arrival. Covid patients bear the legacy in their mute suffering.

The experimental juggling with medicines to treat Covid patients continues. Scientists are trying their level best to elicit an immune response from human trials and generate neutralizing antibodies. Despite many shuffling, unsure attempts to drop it from the shelf, the anti-malarial drug HCQ in combination with some other ones like Remdesvir and Favipiravir continues to hold some promise. As of now, the treatment is basically supportive for lungs, kidneys and heart including oxygen therapy. The force of Corona is so overpowering that other types of sicknesses seem to have suffered. Even cancer appears like something closer to humanity.

It appears we are afraid of Corona more than the death itself. Much as we stare at the doomsday scenario due to the pandemic, Delhi’s three municipalities have actually reported a 36% decrease in deaths during the months of March, April and May in comparison to the same period last year. One of the factors appears to be lesser road accidents during the lockdown. It further appears that other diseases seem to have taken a backseat for the time being. So if the total number of deaths has come down during the pandemic in comparison to the same period in normal times, how come the pandemic laid seize to all we stand for? Probably, it has increased the fear of death exponentially by etching its invisible booby traps at all touch-points around us. 

Good news for the poor people who face difficulty in getting Covid test done. In any case they are always ready to follow the proverb ‘something is better than nothing’. Where there is nothing in life, almost ‘everything’ becomes ‘something’. The loss of smell and taste have been included in the list of symptoms of infection byy the virus. The poorest of the poor have plenty of stench around their hut of misery and smelly frugal food also to carry out these poor man’s test kit, so they can try these if they feel some uneasiness building up. But will they ever forget the smell of misery and helplessness festering their scars when the state appeared to have abdicated its responsibility, leaving them walking the longest journeys of their lives to reach home, hoping that if death has to come, let it be at their own poor homes. They were running to die with respect with their near and dear ones and avoid a dogly filthy death in the urban ghetto.  

Another good news for them as they sit and sulk in their poor houses deep in the villages after escaping from the boiling frying pan of Corona in the cities, where they had gone to earn more and live more. The government plans to build 70000 Km of roads and five million houses to create employment opportunities for these jobless millions. Hope the intention jumps over the paper to materialize on earth bringing some smile to teary eyes.

In our country around 320 million children have faced the Corona consequences including messing up their studies. A brilliant 14-year old Kerala girl committed suicide because she couldn’t attend her online classes. The nefarious combo of patriarchy and poverty is always blocking the path of girl child in India. Even though enrolment rates have gone up, around 4 million girls are still out of school. Sibling care and household chores await them as schools shut down and exams get postponed indefinitely. Nigeria has in fact declared emergency as rapes increased by 300% during the lockdown. Gender-based violence against women and girls has multiplied. Many women could not access maternity services at hospitals, so they delivered babies at home. The newborns missed the customary BCG vaccine that helps the infants in developing immunity against preventable disease and infections.    

Releasing about 3000 prisoners on bail and parole from Tihar Jail to decongest its premises has provided new avenues for petty criminals convicted of snatching, robbery and theft. Habitual criminals are chiefly petty taskmasters busy in theft and burglary. They are the mediocre flies who can afford to hump off of the line of legality now and then without causing too big ripples. After getting released, which of course has happened many times in their lives, they have taken to increase their business. Self-interest and self-preservation comes natural to all species. We human beings have the capacity to stretch it beyond natural limits to infringe upon the very same right of others. We have done the same collectively to other species. The so called criminals, petty and big, do it at the intra-species level within the Homo sapiens.    

The pandemic has reshaped the nature of work in offices. The atmosphere is clouded with pay cuts, jobs on the line, layoffs and furloughs. Pets, gardening, cooking and time with family helped initially. But these things have come as exceptions, or a kind of adventures. But when they become routine, they too turn stale and run to bite like anything.

Virtual meeting through Zoom, realignment of sitting pattern, elimination of touch points, sanitation stations, round-the-clock cleaning and sanitization, and of course work from home have emerged as the new normal. No wonder, people feel alienated personally and professionally. Sanitizing gels are more abundant than cups of tea and coffee and phenyl-reeking interiors kill the perfumed spirit. People coughing into their elbows will still be taken as full of white collar dignity. Gloves, masks, social distancing and floor marking now further widen the psychological distances entrenched in the minds of the modern humans, where all of us are fighting our terribly lone battles.

Lockdown birthdays and anniversaries went without cake. Video calls saved the world. What catastrophe would have befallen us if not for Twittter, Facebook, Whatapp etc?! Internet is the ventilator that has saved our modern civilization from being choked to death. It has saved more lives than any medicine or preventive measure has ever done! People have been trying to kill loneliness by funny poetry and weird watercolors. And of course tortuous is the nostalgia of that bygone era when people went out freely without masks! When we could mingle and hug with gay abandon. When crowds jostled in the markets and eateries were thronged like hungriest sheep in a fresh pasture. 

Brazil is the second worst affected country so far. The city of Sao Paulo is forced to deprive the earthen rights of those long dead to hand over the same to those freshly dead. The graveyards in Sao Polo are crammed to the gills. To clear space for the newly dead, the bodies of long dead are dug up. The bones of the long dead are dug up and stored in bags with tags in huge metal containers. That is the new home of the dead. To qualify to get the swanky new metal container grave, the bones should have remained under the earth for at least three years. They are afraid of tempering with the bones of those who went under the earth less than three years ago. It seems they have some fear that they may hit back, feeling insulted.

The BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement with its killer one knee kneeling posture and anthem of ‘I Can’t Breathe’ has generated a momentum that is now picking up in various domains of life including sports. In India, the situation is boosted exponentially as racism rides piggyback on casteism. The so called upper castes in northern India are relatively fairer than the so called lower castes. Indian sportspersons including cricketers and athletes have spoken out their experiences when they faced casteist-cum-racist prejudices. Noteworthy are the sad experiences of tribals and people from north east India. A former West Indies Captain felt the pinch of a potentially racist nickname given to him by his Indian teammate at the IPL. He has raised the issue belatedly and availed all the pending apologies and explanation by the scared Indian player. In a nutshell, people can’t be as careless about racism like earlier and need to be reeducated.

Closed-door sports, in the absence of riotous fans, of course will be terribly dull affair. The shouts will shift to people’s drawing rooms. The virulent virus has pushed the jostling athletes from the stage to do its own evil cameo. How will the athletes even boost their adrenaline in the absence of that ebullient atmosphere?

Sports are just like riding a bicycle. Their millions of repetitions of their usual move drill those moves into muscle memories. Surely the lack of action during the lockdown must have eased the bulging muscles of some bitter sweet memories. Hugs, celebratory high-fivs, handshakes, headshakes and all types of mingling will take a backseat till the vaccine arrives. Now the shouts of the players and instructions of the support staff will be audible as audience leer over them like peeping toms from their drawing rooms. The players have to mind their words. The video of course will borrow crowd noise from popular video games. Goal celebrations will be muted affairs if not from this doctored videogame noise imposed on the dull pictures. To give you an idea how hard it has become for the sporting world, the soccer coach of a prestigious club had to miss the game because he broke the quarantine rules and went out to buy toothpaste.

The best fashion as of now is PPE suit, glove and mask. The curves will take a backseat and plump winsome people will regain confidence. Body-shaming turns redundant under the new norms of the latest protective fashion.  

Riots will be riots, even if for a good cause. As mobsters loot shops and destroy public property, their armies on a spree to dismantle and deface the statues, monuments and other landmarks of slavery, colonialism and exploitation, Mahatma Gandhi has also been dragged into the matter. The messiah of peace is maligned by the mobsters as a racist. His alleged views about Africans during his stay there are dredged up to demand the removal of his statues in the UK. On the plinth of his statue, ‘racist’ was written. People have signed a petition in thousands to remove his statue in Leicester City.

The BLM campaign is moving like an avalanche taking all and sundry within its frozen grip. In Europe and America, people are breaking and beheading, vandalizing and removing the statues of explorers like Christopher Columbus and Thomas Cook. Churchill also is facing a lot of heat by the way. His big imperialist bloated face was smitten with mud and had to be mopped clean. Churchill and Co are not completely defenseless. They have their far right supporters apart from the police to save them from the rioters’ ire. Far right groups have gathered to save the historical monuments from anti-racism protesters. In the current spell of revolution, the monuments erected in the memory of eminent personalities who used slavery and racism to build empires are under the barrage. Rioters actually believe that they are rewriting history, while in reality it may count as just some fun time out to beat their individual frustration caused by their own deeds in life.        

A brittle and scattered present may help in laying the foundation of a firm future. The mayhem caused by Covid-19 pandemic can indeed be used as an opportunity to turn India self-reliant. The foreign-policies of all the major countries are being realigned from China perspective now. It shows the dragon’s resurgence. Twitter had to shut down 170,000 China propaganda handles. These were directly linked to the communist government to push and prod false information and malafied narratives over Covid-19 and the democratic movement in Hong Kong. Communist ideologues are the masters of coordinated disinformation campaigns. They are expert puppeteers in manipulating mass opinion through social media platforms, so pro-Beijing narrative is spewing through Facebook and Twitter. Their deceptive geopolitical narratives through info-graphics and slogans have raised a military style blizzard to confuse people world over. Meantime, China reports a few dozen fresh cases from Beijing. Who knows, what exactly the truth behind it is. It might again be deliberately managed issue to redirect the changing narrative in their favor.    

The fight to find a vaccine against the common scourge goes on with claims and consequent disappointments. Corona vaccine may be elusive so far, the scientists however claim to have observed the ‘fifth state of matter’ that was long ago predicted by Einstein and Indian mathematician SN Bose almost a century back. Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) come into existence when the when the atoms of specific elements get cooled at absolute zero, 0 Kelvin or  ̶ 273.15 degree Celsius. At this low point, the atoms turn into a single entity having quantum properties, with each particle behaving like a wave of matter also. These might be the elusive link between the microscopic world of quantum mechanics and the macroscopic world of forces such as gravity. These may be the foot-soldiers of the yet unknown dark energy driving the universal expansion.  

There are expected to be new norms set for telling small budget stories. Well, Bolllywood on slim budgets appears like something tragic. Corona has the capacity to clip their wildest wings that earlier took their stories to cosmic extravagant levels. How will the famous Indian movies be possible with social distance norms in place? Imagine shooting intimate stories with social distancing norms! Aged actors not allowed on the scene, so either you have only young actors or funny looking youths acting weird oldies. Garish, lavish cinematic spectacle will be replaced by little intimate stories. And what will be songs without those hundreds of set piece musical with dozens of dancers?  

Sushant Rajput committed suicide. Being a brilliant engineering student, he had the guts to wade in the unchartered waters of dance and theatre. He danced in the shadows of illustrious stars in the troupe at award functions. Took another jump to lead roles in popular TV serials; to finally emerge on the Bollywood scene as a very fine young actor. His career graph looked promising. A commendable feat for someone who was a rank outsider without having any filmi connection. Full of energy, life and enthusiasm, he looked set to get in the league of established frontline actors. His dialogue in his last release Chhichhore makes it terribly ironical: “Suicide is not the solution to anything in life.” An alumini of Delhi college of engineering, he was passionate about science and outer space. He had purchased a plot of land on the remote side of the moon in a region known as the Sea of Muscovy. Titillating personal life, glitz, glamour all swirling so powerfully as to leave one dazed. People say the kingpins of nepotism in filmi world had totally sidelined him; he had lost some prestigious offers under the pressure of the coterie. They are well known names. Their reputation is too solid to be shaken by any allegations in this regard. It has started a debate about the flag bearers of nepotism. How he was perpetually made to feel outsider! His instagram post promoting his upcoming movie is haunting: “If you don’t watch it, they would throw me out of Bollywood. I have no godfather. I’ve made you (all) my Gods and fathers. Watch it if you want to see me survive in Bollywood.” The self-appointed gatekeepers of the castle of nepotism should take a notice of it. There is a gang-leader of the star-kid-brigade. He is very effeminate in manners and feminine in likes and dislikes, thus a darling of many star kids, but has lethal machismo of the brutal-most man on earth. No wonder, it turned out to be a terribly lonely place for the outsider boy from Bihar.

The Tottering Caravan of Thoughts

Lust has no bounds like this ever-expanding universe, so much so that hungry predators in the nobility, who had grown rabid in their lifetime looking at the famed beauty with jealousy as she conquered men of her class, dug up her grave and satiated their devilish hunger on the corpse. The pangs of lust take us to the heavens of procreative moments; they but drag us to the bottom of netherworld also when they high-jack all emotions and logic.  

The lusty Romeo, the chameleon, is red with strong heat. It has erected the ridge of lust for spreading its genes. The force of procreation is humongous. It heaves creation on the onward march. But still more powerful is the fear of death, the primal fear. If not for this, how will he survive to procreate? So he forgets his Juliet and takes to his heels as he finds me too near for the game of privacy.

Fear appears to be driving this creation. Suppose there was no fear at all, what would happen? He would mate right on my head and I would still be condescending! There would be all love around. And we would all die like flies in an open jar of honey, drenched, saturated with sweet and fossilized like insects. Fear seems to be the fuel! So why malign it? There isn't too much of a difference between caution and fear; the difference is only of degrees on the same scale. These are not something qualitatively different; there is just quantitative difference. I take caution primarily because I have inherent fears. Fear is the innocent child; caution is merely a more calculating, graying old man. It doesn't mean they have different flesh and blood. The gene is the same; just a bit staler biology in the one and some inexperienced hormones in the other. Is caution possible without the background of fear that basically prompts us to be cautious?

Abandoning his Laila, the chameleon Majnu scampers away and tries to scale the smooth plastered courtyard fence. As it slips down, it must be thinking, “How I wish I could change my species like I do with my colors and turn a lizard to climb the wall to escape this goonish paparazzi!”

So struggles he now on the compound wall and is being made to pay for falling in forceful love. He has been loitering around lustily, shamelessly following the lady chameleon that resides on the Parijat tree. He is an intruder basically and aggressive as they are supposed to be. He even took an aggressive reddish stance in front of me, taking me as the conservative grandpa of the lady who is against love on principle! But then reality struck him and he had to leave the battlefield and run for dear life to wage the war of lust and love some other time.

As the slip-shoddy Romeo tries to scale the fence, the game of love and lust proceeds undisturbed despite the chameleon and the human engaged in a tussle. Two flies are mating on the gently swaying leaf. Their unending buzzing has gone into a meditative silence. God knows what do they mull over while in that fly missionary position! No love game goes unwatched and scorned at across species including we humans. So another fly peeks over the edge of a neighboring leaf like a grimacing spy. Its eyes seem to be popping out of excitement. Lovemaking on the swaying, airy rhythms of a leafy bed and the jealous peeping Tom! The twig bearing the love bed has big thorns. The air is thus redolent with cribbing, angry warnings by the big barbs on the love-path. But do the lovers care about such pricks on the love-path? Surely they don’t. The surge of hormones serves to turn one blind to all reason as much as it propels the force of procreation. If not for this forgetfulness not too many will jump into the pit.

Corona is doing a scary Cameo with India well into scary sandpits. Our profusely baulking politicians have tremendous lung power, so they should take the fiend head on.

Dancing Lungs Cameo on Covid Tunes is what I suggest for the common people like you and me. Lung aeration and ventilation pranayama means bursts of inhalation and exhalation into lungs as per the individual's capacity without putting too much strain; focusing with an inward smile on the lungs. Be your own saintess and turn the chi energy on the fingers into your own blessings; tap with fingers of both hands on the chest with an inner smile with eyes closed. One's energy flows as per the rhythms of our emotions, so be your own healer and believe in yourself, your energy, your blessing hands. Let almighty keep all of us safe. Take asvagandha and Giloy tablets to boost immunity. And most importantly, pray for all! Giloy the majestic creeper must be shivering with fear as the entire country runs to cut its stalks to boil and drink with relish to retain immunity against the epidemic.

Don't miss the inner smile while doing this! An emotion decides whether a blizzard of energy is constructive or destructive in manifestation. For example, the same amount of sexual energy under the dark spell of lust turns one into a rapist; while the very same sexual energy if guided well through spiritual practices makes one an embodiment of godliness. The choice is always ours!

We are also scared like rabbits as of now. For too long we have been hunting everything that came our way. In Charles Dickens' lingo, we can ask the resourceful modern man, "All's fish that comes to your net, I suppose?" Now is the turn to get hunted down in return. Hope our fleeting memory will retain some of the Corona era lessons!

Charles Dickens says in Dombey and Sons: “It's when our budding hopes are nipped beyond recovery by some rough wind, that we are the most disposed to picture to ourselves what flowers they might have borne, if they had flourished.” Isn’t it a gloomy stage of missed opportunities? How much we have lost in the pursuit of unchecked gain!

Then there are people playing pranks on social media. A video has gone viral. An alleged ghost is gymming on the open bulwark in a park at 2 o clock in the night. The policemen look on as the bars go swinging back and forth. A doctored video definitly! But even if it is true, why does a ghost need toned muscles if it cannot flex them in our face. At the most, it's an airy fart, trail of piss and a hideous lump of poop. It doesn't make any difference whether it appears like a skeleton or a World champ body builder!

Bagheera, named after the famed black panther in Mougali, the only spotlessly jet black canine king of the village, walks in as he finds our gate open. He walks in with surety of a nice welcome. He knows we drool over him for his majestic looks. He doesn’t need chapattis for there are enough thrown in front of him by all and sundry. He needs more affectionate words for which he has endless hunger. His stomach may not allow him to eat all that is given to him, but his sparkling yellow eyes like a panther’s have enough deep pools where anyone can dive with love and affection.

Spotless black dogs are rare. There must be something special about them. The Tantra mystics of Kanphata Gorakhnath sect used to carry a spotless black dog on their shoulders on their spiritual march across India. Bagheera was initially raised by a peasant woman but she allows him to rule the streets of the entire village. So everyone has a feeling of ownership about him. He roams around with majestic air of freedom. He definitely seems to have a feeling of his specialty. He is well fed, for there are many who drool over him for his looks. While the rest of the dogs howl and bicker over trivial matters, he moves around unconcerned without falling into trivial canine matters. He is cool and composed.

I remember a chilly winter early morning. It had rained overnight and fog had frozen the surroundings. Around 4 o’ clock, I was on my early morning walk and Bagheera joined me at one street corner. He walked a few paces in front of me like a confident bodyguard against darkness that appeared defeated by his majestic color. Cool, composed and perfectly poised he walked ahead of me, without taking too much of trouble in sniffing out time-killing mischief in the path-side bushes. Far away in the countryside, when I turned back to come back, he just looked back once and kept on walking into the darkness as if asking me to follow him further. I expected him to come back after me. But he being a master of his own will kept on walking. Bagheera returned on the third day. God knows what realizations he availed during the solitary sojourn!

Some food for thought, or rather thought for food! The things that we usually eat for our tongue ought to tasted, not eaten. The food that we are reminded to take for our stomach, must be eaten, not gobbled. But we do the reverse. We gobble down the things that must be merely tasted. And we flimsily taste the things that must be actually eaten! The forces on the periphery of our existence create desires that always drive us off the path, taking us into the puzzling pathways, where we end up spending our entire life and energy in banging our head against walls and moving just by chance, driven by random forces. On the other hand, there is the option of living by choice. The ability to live by choice increases in proportion to the distance we create from the outermost peripheral forces controlling our life. The more we move away from the fringes, the lesser becomes the chance factor in life driven by circumstantial winds. Does it mean that our feelings are basically flimsy means of we losing the track and the thoughts are the tack-lines meant to draw us back onto the path for safety and survival?

Beyond thoughts and feelings, Mexican Petunia smiles after months! He was Ma's favorite little plant son, dazzling with violet smiles almost all the time. She really appreciated and mused over this little soldier of smile's spirit in outdoing others of bigger brand-names. Then she left this body to be part of everything to keep her evolution in another dimension. The plant seemed to go into mourning and stopped smiling anymore. It smiles again! Ma is surely smiling and watching with a motherly muse over my follies! Love you Ma!

Nearby, the dazzling pink pout of Kiss Me Quick flower creeps out with a coquettish welcome. Her slender body creeps across the intimidating underbrush to offer a little bouquet of smile. All is well, she whispers! Love and smiles are always eager to sprout through thick stony walls, barricades and difficulties provided we have the pause to acknowledge them.

A renegade dark and grey big-horned bull is breakfasting right in front of our gate. He has defected from the famished cattle horde of Rajasthani nomadic herders and appears to have settled for an independent life in greener pastures. Well, nothing wrong with his choice if he is ok with a solitary life that comes with many struggles in comparison to a grouped life. Freedom can’t be cashed man; it has its own yardstick to measure life and living! My only concern is that he doesn't start gobbling the cannabis plants hovering above the grass. A bull high on weed looks too much for our rickety gate!

Yellow Hibiscus offers her first smile after being planted. Nothing beats the fun of helping blossom baby soft petals smile at their best even in this 40 degree plus scorching heat. Summer flowers have their own charm! They look at you with the message that even in the fiery guts of misery, there are possibilities of smiles, provided we don't lose our faith in smiles! To the hell with pandemic, here this baby smiles so winsomely even after getting fired by merciless Sun's cannon-fire through the day! Keep smiling, adversities are nourishment for being our best version! We always have the choice of cutting the soot of adversities and keep it a smiling plant and not allow it turn into a parasitic creeper suffocating us to death.

It’s a year of tragedies. Sushant Singh Rajput, the young Bollywood star, committed suicide. I would like to spare him from the only question entire India is bombarding his soul with, i.e., "Why", and offer my humble condolences. RIP brother!

Much as we condemn the act of self-termination, we ought to look into the issue of self-inflicted mortality with a fresh perspective! The issue of mental health has been hijacked by mock-sympathy on social media while millions continue to die slowly even while I am writing these lines. The topic of suicide has been bracketed so abstractly that to talk otherwise turns almost a sin by default. Corona-forced lockdown has further narrowed the escape route for those in depression.

With our limited knowledge of our physiognomy and psychosomatic build up, we have simply gone into gross generalized narrative about suicide and such psychological accidents that defy all the apparent laws of self preservation. All I can say is that we are far more ignorant about this issue that most of us think! We have to look at it from a broader and more elevated plane. The higher dimensions of perception have fewer and fewer people; hence these opinions may sound unorthodox. But that shouldn't discourage one's quest for truth. Was the path to the things that later turned truths free of barbed fence? Keep journeying! Let all of us have a nice path of self realization building up ahead! Best wishes!

Dancing Lungs Cameo on the Covid Tunes

Lung aeration and ventilation pranayama...bursts of inhalation and exhalation into lungs as per individual's capacity without putting too much strain... focussing with an inward smile on the lungs...be your own saintess...turn the chi energy on fingers into your own blessings...tap with fingers of both hands on the chest with an inner smile with eyes closed... one's energy flows as per the rhythms of our emotions, so be your own healer and believe in yourself, your energy, your blessing hands...let almighty keep all of us safe. Take asvagandha and Giloy tablets to boost immunity. And most importantly, pray for all!
PS: Don't miss the inner smile while doing this! An emotion decides whether a blizzard of energy is constructive or destructive in manifestation. For example, the same amount of sexual energy under the dark spell of lust turns one into a rapist; while the very same sexual energy if guided well through spiritual practices makes one an embodiment of godliness. The choice is always ours!

Fear is the child; Caution is the grown up man!

The lusty Romeo....the force of procreation is humongous. It heaves creation on the onward march. But still more powerful is the fear of death, the primal fear. If not for this, how will he survive to procreate? So he forgets his Juliet and takes to his heels. Fear appears to be driving this creation. Suppose there was no fear at all, what would happen? He would mate right on my head and I would still be condensending! There would be all love around. And we would all die like flies in an open jar of honey, drenched, saturated with sweet and fossilized. Fear seems to be the fuel! So why malign it? There isn't too much of a difference between caution and fear, only of degrees. These are not something qualitatively different. Just quantitative difference. I take caution primarily because I have inherent fears. Is caution possible without the background of fear that basically prompts us to be cautious?

Faking Cobras and Boisterous Rabbits

We Indians have been too growth oriented of late, so how could we stay behind in the Corona race. As the second week of June turns north Indian planes almost torture chambers, Corona cases are now swiftly building up the ominous tempo. Already at fourth position with a quarter million confirmed cases, and an equal, if not more, unconfirmed cases, we are sure to beat America during the monsoon season. As people come barging out, feeling terribly tortured in the lockdown prison, the stampede seems a fertile ground for the gleeful virus waiting outside the trench-works.

Unfortunately, those who are over-zealous to jump over the fence to claim more of life and living on their skewed terms are the ones who haven’t faced starvation ever in their lives, nor are they expected anytime in future. The current stampeded is driven by those who aren’t missing the basic necessities of life; they are the ones who need more, the ever-luxuriant human greed. The poorest of the poor have just reached their homes hundreds of miles away from the cities. They are the ones who face starvation and whose jumping over the fence might be justified, if at all. They but will stay where they are. They have given their all to reach home, so even a starvation death at home will appear better than dying in the urban stampede again. It, however, is again a matter of time before poverty will force them to come back to the burning furnace that kills them and keeps them somehow alive at the same time, the famed urban centers.

Scary news is surfacing about the treatment of Corona cases. The government and medical institutions appear spent of their zeal to fight more. They seem to have spent their fuel. Hospitals are saying a loudmouthed ‘no’ to admit even the confirmed Corona cases. In many cases, even to the people with visible symptoms they discourage testing and ask them to take precaution at home. Even the most critical patients have been denied admittance and a few have died. Critical patients of other lesser ailments like cancer are hardly given priority and advised against loitering around hospitals. A few hospitals are minting gold charging many hundred thousand rupees for simple routine Corona treatment costing a few thousand rupees in reality. It appears to be going speedily down the typical chaotic Indian way.

There is a silver lining as well over the edges of the impending gloomy dark cloud. We boisterous Indians are adept at digesting many a bug in squalid conditions. With recovery rate at 50%, it seems to be encouraging people to take the enemy head on. Another pleasant scene that touched the heartstrings is the sight of migrant workers being welcomed with marigold garlands and a genuine smile. Usually, a poor migrant agricultural hand rarely gets even a cursory look by the local farmers. Stray dogs and migrant workers both enjoy the freedom of anonymity to the same degree. Under the new normal, however, a migrant worker is a rare species and hence worth acknowledging and giving a smile. Punjab paddy farmers actually sent a chartered bus to carry workers from Bihar. A chartered bus is a poor man’s chartered plane. On arrival, the broad robust farmers welcomed the thin famished workers with flower garlands and genuine smiles. They de-boarded the bus to the shouts of appreciation and clapping as if they are the soldiers on a special mission.   

America is again in a soup. Just like Wuhan virus spread from China to derail the entire world, the racism virus spreading from the mind of a murderous policeman has spread across the globe. People seem in a real mood to protest. ‘Black Lives Matter’ is the movement that has positively infected the conscience of world citizens in dozens of countries. It at least is a good infection, not like Chin-hatched one that spells doom and destruction. But even a good infection is an infection after all. It unleashes loot, plunder and pillage of property alongside the genuine prayers for racial equality.

China on its part has turned a war-monger. It prefers to be seen as utterly belligerent to appease the nationalistic sentiment at home. It’s using the dramatic rhetoric of its military, like a fantastic Cobra hissing to mesmerize the audience with its majestic hood, to draw the narrative away from Corona. These military drill clippings appear to have been taken from some war-jingoistic movies from Hollywood. At least military movie-making will get a boost in the land of Panda. Loss of revenue for popular American action movies it means.

The PLA soldiers have actually sneaked 10 Km inside the Indian territory along the LAC in Ladhak. They have pitched tents, built up reinforcement and are smirking with their little eyes and yellow faces at the robust Jat and Sikh soldiers who overpower them in the physical scuffle game where no bullet is permitted, keeping the skirmishes to jostling, pushing, abusing and even throwing stones. The state controlled media plays Hollywood style cute videos of its military preparing to strike any moment.

Does anyone remember when the PLA soldiers actually fought? Not many, I am sure. The last war they fought was in 1979 in Vietnam and the tiny country soundly beat them blue. In contrast, the Indian forces are forever in the boiling cauldron of anti-militancy combat operations in Kashmir mountains, thanks to our dear buddy Pakistan. No wonder, Indians appear far more battle prepared in the mountains than the Chinese and it should come as no surprise if the yellow faced red bully gets a blue bump on the forehead in case some battle actually happens, which is highly unlikely in any case. Military scene will scatter away in proportion to the Corona talk fading away from the scene.

America is whimpering that the Chinese hackers are stealing latest Covid vaccine researches to stall their progress in order to make their own vaccine and then cash on world’s collective miseries through dumping medicines from New York to Timbuktu like they dump cheap toys. Was business ever free of exploitation in one form or the other? So why blame little red-capped, yellow faced, tiny eyed champions of egalitarianism only for this?

It leaves us at the question: Who will emerge victorious in this cold war of faked belligerency? The answer is ‘America’. Indisputably! It may take even a decade for the communist system to crash but that is inevitable. It is not a question if that will take place. The only question is ‘When’. What makes me so sure about it? Well, the communist system is inherently fallible. It has the raw power to surge like a dastardly blitz-kriz rapid fire cannon, but it is bound to burn its fuel before putting the satellite into a stable orbit. It’s too unsustainably manipulative. The system, the communist party, primarily focuses on keeping its own population at a far too low level by repeatedly cutting their wings of individual freedom and liberty to keep them as manageable entity. Everyone is a prospective state enemy! The state is forever wary and apprehensive of its own people. Of course, the pressure cooker has its bearing limits. You know what I mean. Let the coming years answer for it!

A democracy, however flawed a system it might be, in contrast has far less reasons to be insecure about its own people. Instead of cutting their wings, political parties vie with each other to win their favorable opinion. It’s a slowly heaving elephant that goes lumbering on and on despite many pitfalls and bickering. Communism is an angry crouching tiger; it has to feed on phobias, both internal and external. It growls, pounces, claws and tears for bloody scary scenes. How long it will continue hunting. A species that simply eats without any intimidation, like an elephant, has more survival chance than a species that hunts ferociously. Sounds contradictory? Well, not so if you think a bit more deeply about it.             

It’s said that the gunpowder was invented unintentionally by Taoist master alchemists looking for the elixir of life. Well, the innocent monks surely ended up making the elixir of death! What a miscarriage of the idea! Communism as an ideology is the modern equivalent of the miscarriage of the idea of equality. It was offered to bring heaven and ended up bringing hell.    

I am no strategic analyst. I am a common Indian speaking from my humble lodging in the countryside. I take lessons from life thriving around and advise Chinese to provide safety valve to their system before it bursts.

I am sure most of us have seen a sweet-sour tug of war among a group of trees in a narrow space. Much as different trees push and prod to kiss the sunrays, they are ready to recede and be on the backfoot at the same time. They are ready to take frontfoot with as much enthusiasm as they are ready to go on backfoot. Much as they try their level best to go straight to kiss the rays of survival, they are equally prepared to bend down to the necessity and take a detour in the face of obstruction. It’s a beautiful balance between surging ahead and surrender. All this is beyond winning and losing, a marvelous equilibrium. Ego, the phantom malady of we humans, cannot survive on such a beautiful line drawn with unqualified composure. No wonder, it’s beyond winning and losing. These are the fallacious categories mischievously hatched by the existential forces to put testing hurdles on the path of our evolution. It’s as simple as a constraint on a plant or tree that faces natural limits and hurdles to its growth. A plant grows egolessly, unaware of the terms of winning and losing, and hence there is hardly any suffering in its journey. We are a bit more aware egoistic plants, popping out to grow and be so much more aware to lose this restricting ‘limited awareness’ of cutting down reality in poor fractions. To be frank, a plant or tree appears more evolved than us in this regard. What we aim to gain after intense spiritual practices is naturally available to a tree. So who is more evolved? In my opinion, it’s the tree! In fact, the spiritual model of evolution—in which we take mankind as the more evolved species after having traversed through the lower realms of plants and animals—may indeed be the reverse. Like, we may be at the base and by shedding our illusionary mindwork, we are moving to higher states of egolessness, crossing over to animals to trees to grasses to dust to nothingness, on the path to become part of everything by shedding all sense of ‘I, My and Me’. I at least feel like worshipping trees more than I feel prostrating before any of the so called holiest feet on earth.     

I am unrestrained in my devotion to the divine feminine. To me male and female means more of traits beyond strictly biological categorization as we usually do. This existence has two basic elements: receptive (feminine) and aggressive (male). We have males trapped in female bodies and vice versa on the basis of the ratio of either feminine or manly bearing in their persona. So sexuality is basically attitude not just genitals. As a Taoist follower, I am more inclined to revere and worship the feminine face of creation. No wonder I see the glaring injustices against women in traditional societies like India. To escape boredom, a man has to just extend his normal schedule; the same extension, which barely meets a woman's paltry effort to tide over her boredom, turns her into a sinner.

Look around and you will find the woman, a representative of the divine feminine, is the stronger and superior force. Her gently flowing spirit, like cool waters, assuages the fire in man, the rugged representative of divine masculinity. She carefully douses the male fire. The burning volcano in him loses its flame. Yin energy, the pliable, soft, surrendering, receptive and yielding polarity of creation, unfailingly conquers yang, the hard knots standing at the rigid polarity on the other end. Holy waters are yin. Earth and stones are yang. The majestic serpentine curves of rivers are yin, the divine female. Its softness has the tightest grip. It wins and triumphs over solid most and hardest rocks. Mountains give in. A gentle stream slowly, imperceptibly wears and corrodes a mammoth mountain and writes its victorious tales in majestic valleys. Accept it O thou poor man, accept! Fire has to go; water has to flow!

Still we are at the same stage that was set up by Charles Dickens around 200 years back in his seminal work on patriarchy, Dombey and Son! Charles Dickens took 900 pages to express it. A proud rosy Papa is holding the soft lilac infant bud as if the son-crazy father will protect the infant son even from a nuclear strike. The force of patriarchy gets revealed in a brief pause! I am afraid a daughterly bud hardly stands a chance to blossom to her full potential. If we can spare the discomforting sight and smell of the overblown patriarchy, it’s an afternoon drink for the eyes: sherbet mixed with milk! The father-son rose duo has red traces in their white.

Nearby stand handsome homegrown Peepal lads! They will taste fun and frolicking days during the coming monsoons after being planted in the wild. Then they will give shelter to saints, sages, thieves, ghosts, spirits and commoners like you, me and all without any discrimination!

Much as I care to the best of my capacity to bloom a single exquisite rose, the least cared flowers blossom the most! Sadabahar, nicknamed by so many like a homeless street urchin: Catharanthus roseus, bright eyes, Cape periwinkle, graveyard plant, Madagascar periwinkle, old maid, pink periwinkle, rose periwinkle. Cut them, leave them waterless, don't look and appreciate them, forget them, treat them cheaper than grass, they will bear all insults and ignominy just to smile all through the year. Seasonless beauties! Mollycoddle your nursery rose like the apple of your eye, these destitutes don't feel jealous. Feed the cherished and highly pampered exotic flowers with the nectar of your love and affection, these orphans still don't mind. Let your pruner go carelessly over their eager to play petals, cutting and bruising them, they still don't lose their smile. They are happy with what mother Earth has given them. They don't need more. And still how much we hanker after the spoilt dandies, who bring many tears in our eyes to give a solitary smile in return!

Like our creeping civilization, the giloy tendril has taken hold of a baby soft new soot of grass to reach the wall! To be an ultramodern successful creeper, we usually use our tendrils like tentacles to reach the wall of our goals. Our tendrils and tentacles latch onto the softest sinews, even if that means killing and suffocating the tiny offshoot that needs help and support itself, on the way to hit our post. Sometimes I think, after witnessing the rawest elements of nature, this creation is imbued with self interest, and our pretty human selfishness is just a portion of the infinite force of self-preservation that we see around. What do you think?