About Me

My photo
Hi, this is somebody who has taken the quieter by-lane to be happy. The hustle and bustle of the big, booming main street was too intimidating. Passing through the quieter by-lane I intend to reach a solitary path, laid out just for me, to reach my destiny, to be happy primarily, and enjoy the fruits of being happy. (www.sandeepdahiya.com)

Thursday, December 16, 2021

A list of my books

 Dear readers, your encouragement always inspires me to continue writing. Thank you all who have always supported and encouraged me on my path of learning to write better with each new book! God bless!

10, The Night Sun
https://www.24by7publishing.com/buy-books.html

Wednesday, December 8, 2021

A few moments inside a bus

Ten years is a big time to unleash massive changes in a metropolis like Delhi. But certain features are so deep-rooted that one can feel their shadows even while the things seem to have changed drastically. This sketch about Delhi is exactly a decade old but I’m sure you will still feel these lingering shadows when you visit the national capital.

Here is an early December morning. Salutes Delhi! To make it sound normal you are two-eyed. But they have different visions, different dreams, different destinations. One of your pan-shots swankily zooms on the glitz-and-glamour of the resurgent India. Whether it is right-eye pan-shot or left-eye, I do not know. But yes the other eye's camera shot pervasively covers the classic tragedies spread out in black and white. It’s a grizzled, murky screen having classic comicities and tragedies spinning, whirring around the same axis. It’s Muhharram today. Many offices are closed. It just means you can drop your purse on the DTC bus floor and still you are left with a realistic chance of retrieving it. Eight wonder almost! So at least you can see a few feet around you. Great solace indeed. The air too is not stuffed with guffaws let out by infected throats and lungs, disordered stomachs, cheap scents and Deos from Palika Bazaar and above all the usual individual and collective frustrations. See, when the maker offered these buses (allegedly along with the kickbacks per piece and which is more important to our rampaging politicians) the real cost of the machine is just meant to carry this type of load, the festival load, once-in-a-time load when people do not travel on account of holidays or some other emergency.

On this observable stage, a 14-year-old man-kid jumbles into the finally justified interiors of the poor green line. Boy he is a real man, carries a pole that would tower above the poor bus if their vertical components competed. He slants it, his small hands maneuver it smartly and the camel is safely in the room. The pole is the dancing axis of many types of cheapest kid toys as you might say can be afforded by the childhood mushrooming in slums. All fellow-riders watch him in half amuse and half irritation. Lampoons like yours truly even laugh at the free show.

Anyways, coming back to this character valiantly playing its part in the grizzly black and white ever-spooling movie. He rushes to the conductor seat after killing all the apprehensions and objections of the busvala about the pole falling and the kids-stuff getting a playground on their heads. The boy-entrepreneur gets the DTC day-pass costing 40 rupees. Man-o-man! How much this kid earns to afford the pass? Anyways, that is none of our concern like most of the Delhi things should not be. One fact is inescapable: the well-meant boy is well-prepared for the day. The way he has tied the muffler, the way his cheap jacket is buttoned up to the collar, the way trousers well-fit his thin legs and the way well-cleaned shoes purchased from the road-side hawker, all these portend a good successful business plan.

One problem with the new DTC bus is that its doors open too invitingly with a hiss, as if it is specially inviting you for a joy-ride. Carried by the swift winds of one such invitation, an Advasi family raids the semi-occupied bus. The conductor baulks, 'Not without tickets you thieves!' 'Hutt you miser, we have money!' the dark old lady draped in a big raggish blanket shouts. God knows how many of them are in the group! It is a defiant pariah unit cocking a snook at the organized hordes of Delhi. One monkey-like infant immediately grabs the hand-rails overhead and tries gymnastics. One of its hands also bust the balloon tied at the upper end of the toy pole. Both its owner and the conductor shriek painfully.

So many raggish kids carry their unsuspecting selves to the empty seats and dump the gypsy spirit for a while. Their neighbors almost vomit in disgust. They feel their dignity has been severely violated. A slim lady carries a toddler on her shoulder, one infant on her hip and most probably the another one inside her as the glossy black bulge of her abdomen shines from the short kurti she is wearing above the gracious folds of a dirty long skirt. It just becomes a thoroughfare. The conductor fights for tickets. They stand their positions, gibberishly, savagely. And where were they going? Whole of the NCR is their destination. No particular destination means destination everywhere. It is just a matter of holding onto the ride till the fight with the conductor acquires serious colors. And the moment it does, they just dump themselves with the same teasing indecency like they had raided the bus and vanish from the scene. Well, we missed a parting shot. As they get down and try to scrape through the jostling crowd, they block the path of a brand new Mercedes for a long moment. Delhi, salutes! You bear witness to the two paradoxical movie-makings by the camera lenses in your eyes!

December dose

 Dear friends, if life isn't making much of a sense then give an ear to the Voice Inside. Forget about the hoot and holler emanating from the world outside. It simply adds to the confusion. Give an ear to the soft and murmurous cooings emanating from the soul. It has a soft and sympathetic message for you only, your most personal message, meant only for you. Listen to these delicate chimes. It’ll help you in finding peace in chaos. In getting a foothold in the stampede. In feeling rest, repose and respite in the face of constant buffeting by the world around. It’ll help you in breaking the hardest of superficial layers, which suffocate and limit your identity. And put you face to face with your true self, your real worth.

Listen to it, close your eyes and pay attention with all your heart. Just for a change, don’t look far, look closest at yourself. It’ll be as uneventful as looking at a dust particle around your feet. But it changes the universe for you. You will have the biggest message in the softest of whispering phrases! It’ll help you in finding yourself. Happy self-seeking! God bless us all!

**

Reading Ruskin Bond by the Ganges is as good as meditation. He simplifies the complexities of life with his simple, lucid sentences.

**

I had just walloped in Ma Ganga like a farmer's dirty calf after reading these lines by Ruskin Bond:

"I feel drawn to little temples on lonely hilltops. With the mist swirling around them, and the wind humming in the stunted pines, they absorb some of the magic mystery of their surroundings and transmit it to the questing pilgrim."

Biniya is a little girl of 7 who sells flowers on the banks of Ganga Ma. She is into side business also. She charges me ten rupees to click my photos on my mobile. I had started this. Instead of buying her flowers, I asked her once to click my pic and gave her a salary of ten rupees for the job. After that she has taken her job too seriously. Whenever she sees me on the banks of Ganges she offers her photographic skills instead of flowers. "Uncle photo khichva lo!" she says pretty adamantly. She calls me 'photo wale uncle' as her mother informed me. Today as I was wallowing in Ma Ganga's cold waters, she stood on the steps and waited for me to come out. "Go and sell your flowers. You are losing business," I try to shoo her away. But she has better ideas. "Uncle today you have to get a photo. You have got your beard and hair cut so it will be a nice photo," she has her argument in support of her side business. I am helpless. She clicks another assignment. Hands me the phone and asks a review of the photo. "See uncle, I have made you look like a hero." Buttering, eh. And her so called hero type photo has bigger charges. She is an experienced photographer now and charges more. "Uncle 100 rupees for this hero type photo," she demands. I am initially at loss of words. There is an argument and then I save 50 rupees by standing my ground pretty soundly. Now the assignment charge has gone to 50 rupees, so tomorrow onwards I won't take my phone with me and buy her flowers instead. Her little leaf bowl of flowers costs just 10 rupees. That would help both parties. But there was a nice take away from today's shooting. I am actually looking at a nice little temple on a little hill as Biniya does her job. I remember Bond sahab's lines. I too have a fondness for small temples on lonely hills. And there I went to soak a few hours of magic and mystery.

**

Why does truth pinch most of the time? Simple! Because it is no chocolate, sugar candy or mellowable sweetie-pie lump of ice cream. It is hard, sour, iron ball guys. It has pinching rough stony edges to its surface. Come into contact with them and they will take a few flakes from your skin leaving a red or purple bruise depending on the intensity of truth contained in it. Now the question arises, 'Why does it almost always leave a grimace on our face instead of a smile?' The simple fact that all of us almost always rub cold shoulders against this ironed ball having thorns for our soft skin, proves on fact: that we are not subjectively inclined to accept the objective reality as it stands in abstract. But does not that mean that we have moved poles apart from truth and its manifestations while going on the path of individual and collective improvisations at the subjective level. May be the reason for our success in emerging at the top of food chain in the game of 'survival of the fittest' is that we have institutionalized ourselves to negate and defy, and do without, certain basic truths that form the core of creation and nature. Nothing wrong with that! It, however, is paradoxical that most of these scions of truth--against which we have always been taking cudgels--form the core of our moral, humanistic, religious, spiritual and aesthetic vision enshrined in preach books. Strange!

**

Look far away into the mists...but always watch your next step also... take a step...take a pause then and look into the distances before the next step...and go slow....it allows a healthy balance of sight, observation, dreams and imagination. You enjoy the journey and don't bother about destination. Most importantly, moving on from the past is usually a far better journey than you ever imagined!

**

Some moments by the Ganges. Light and dark rippling in the lap of holy fluidity. Soft emotions surface as the soul's tears of joy! O divine mother, my main identity is that of being your son. I feel disburdened of some heaviness. I find the unnecessary extras of life just a dark, blank spot where the face of my ego plays a little, funny, worldly game.

**

The beautiful bunch of roses drizzles its petals on the ground after the heartiest of blooming. Joyful dissolution of the self! A flower blooms up fully. Opens its heart to the elements around. Draws every ounce from its potential to smiles and fragrance. Opens up completely. And then painless dissolve! This dissolution is further expansion only. Now the petals fly around in a broader dimension. Beautiful, self-surrendered parts of its previous existence now lie scattered as pious homage to mother earth. That is the purpose of life. We have to give back something better than what we took. That is evolution, expansion. Like this flower offers fragrance and smiles to mother earth in return for the sunshine, soil and moisture. The sole purpose of our existence is to be a better version of ourselves.

**

A hybrid rose can have nice colour and exquisite design. But it lacks the basic essence of a flower, fragrance. The beauty is skin deep, a mere cosmetic effort at the surface. It's haughty and arrogant, a kind of constriction within itself, an insecurity, a fear, an aloofness, a seperation. The soul is missing. They seem too self-absorbed. Like so many apparently classy, well polished gentry. They stand with touch-me-not attitude. And the bees and butterflies stay away. They find it totally unapproachable. The marigolds, on the other hand, are little humble, down to earth flowers. They aren't showy. They are common looking. But they have a soul, a depth, a delicate fragrance. Most importantly, they have nectar to offer to the butterflies and bees. With their openness and genteel receptivity, they are buzzing with little winged insects. They have broader connection to life and living. I can feel their soul through their soft fragrance as I sit by them. They exist in a dimension where they touch many chords in my heart. The smelless roses are as distant and soulless as a beautiful pic of them or even well designed plastic flowers.

**

It happened 12 years back in Delhi. The moment still stands out somehow. Some brief moments carry far more significance than months and sometimes even years. Hazy darkness outside the railway station. A friar approached me with mystical pride and spiritual pomp. He asked for alms (which can be money only given the times we are living in). I found myself offering him Rs. 10. A Gentleman verbally poked me for my meekness and abetment of begging. The friar shot back, ‘Do you think it's only about money. If you think so, take this!’ He proffered a Rs. 100 note. The gentleman had to beat a retreat. The friar smiled at me and melted into the crowd after blessing me.

**

If you have time and softness to plant flowers, take some time to appreciate their beauty once they blossom up. Needless to say, always spare time for your children once you have taken time to produce them.

**

If you are hurrying and a tree's branch braces against your head or face, don't get irritated. It's merely a soft greeting asking you to be restful. Accept it. You can run fast and still be at rest within. What else is meditation? It's the ability to be still within even while you are walking or dispensing what life needs you to do in order to survive.

**

Most of the time we are self-charged on the grand mission of aggravating our own miseries. We are suitably helped all along by our ability to hold onto the master illusion that others are responsible for all the shit flying around in our lives.

Sunday, December 5, 2021

A cosmetic smile Vs a soulful one

 A hybrid rose can have nice colour and exquisite design. But it lacks the basic essence of a flower, fragrance. The beauty is skin deep, a mere cosmetic effort at the surface. It's haughty and arrogant, a kind of constriction within itself, an insecurity, a fear, an aloofness, a seperation. The soul is missing. They seem too self-absorbed. Like so many apparently classy, well polished gentry. They stand with touch-me-not attitude. And the bees and butterflies stay away. They find it totally unapproachable. The marigolds, on the other hand, are little humble, down to earth flowers. They aren't showy. They are common looking. But they have a soul, a depth, a delicate fragrance. Most importantly, they have nectar to offer to the butterflies and bees. With their openness and genteel receptivity, they are buzzing with little winged insects. They have broader connection to life and living. I can feel their soul through their soft fragrance as I sit by them. They exist in a dimension where they touch many chords in my heart. The smelless roses are as distant and soulless as a beautiful pic of them or even well designed plastic flowers.




Open up...and spread out...

 Joyful dissolution of the self! A flower blooms up fully. Opens its heart to the elements around. Draws every ounce from its potential to smiles and fragrance. Opens up completely. And then painless dissolve! This dissolution is further expansion only. Now the petals fly around in a broader dimension. Beautiful, self-surrendered parts of its previous existence now lie scattered as pious homage to mother earth. That is the purpose of life. We have to give back something better than what we took. That is evolution, expansion. Like this flower offers fragrance and smiles to mother earth in return for the sunshine, soil and moisture. The sole purpose of our existence is to be a better version of ourselves.