Love and Loss

 North India had almost unprecedented winters this year. Biting mountainous winds screeched like a viciously self-obsessed demon. The plains down south shivered with a foredoomed look. Some lewd, lascivious and ghoulish hollow-cheeked monster, in a deep cave full of brooding eccentricities, crawled out for some meaty slice off the mesmeric charms decorating the usual world with its normal-time immeasurable flimsiness and staid similarity.    

The spell of freezing cold reached with snowy tenacity well into the otherwise balmy sunny days of February, so much so that January and February appeared no different from each other in frosty bite. The winters shivered with excessive eloquence. Heavy spells of snows in the Himalayas and intermittent rains and hailstorms in the plains defined it as the chillingly savage spell of winters in a year that will stand as a milestone for many a gloomy reason. An insignificant and atypical challenger would muster up powerful fantasy and the flourishing legend of a microscopic entity would bring humanity to its knees.

A few weeks before Corona would strip the entire world of its routine self-preservative assurance, I was thoroughly robbed by destiny in a single, heartless stroke. After years of struggle to beat the nagging pulsations of a vague restlessness, which won’t allow me to be at peace with whatever I did, I had finally started feeling the honeyed chimes of stability and peace, my mother being the center of the comfortable ambience of this oasis amidst the sighing hot winds of existence. With the solace, support and succor of her presence, the routine problems of life appeared merely fading spectacles. I no longer felt like the usual footsore, bruised and lacerated traveler.

Some diabolical brew-maker, the unknowable invisible potentate in stealthy league with its tangible agents on earth, was busy in subterranean cooking; ill-fate of millions bubbling in the fiery volcanic womb inside the seething, hissing underbelly; the ominous bubbles just starting to give a clue to the potion of tragedy. The news of a mysterious virus stalking human life at Wuhan in China had started to trickle in. To the rest of the world, it seemed far away in the haze of dusty distances. Isn’t it that we regularly see death and its imprints so near around us and still find it farthest from our own self?

Some mysterious flu was creating a lot of trouble there, we heard through uncertain snippets appearing in the media. Media persons tried to peek over the fence to make out what exactly it was. However, China being China, one couldn’t be sure of exactly what was happening. The intricate craftsmanship and exquisite embroidery of ideological egalitarianism symbolically darns many a sinful holes born of the juggernaut of equality. The murky moorings of ideological indoctrination holding the shaky cargo ship believed to be stuffed with all the needful provisions for the un-classed welfare of the entire society. Ironically, what is ‘needful’ is left undefined and varies with the ‘needs’ of those in power. Truth is rarely hidden more securely behind the façade of illusions than the golden lines in the red book.

So, we, the darkly famous, disillusioned rebels outside the dragon land, were fairly unconcerned and absorbed in our cheery clatter of fables and fantasy that we interpret as individual freedom and liberty. Nonetheless, there were premonitions of something very dangerous from whatever facts we could muster up. The rest of the world appeared not much concerned, just like we aren’t bothered about our own death even while attending someone’s funeral. One’s own death appears most distant even in the face of its ubiquitous imprints in others’ lives at every nook corner. We, the rest of the world, thought it was basically China’s problem. How wrong we would be proved a couple of months down the line! And how wrong I would stand out in feeling the ‘at last’ kind of stability and routine peace in life!

All of us have autobiographical illuminations of happiness and pain, dark and light, and good and bad. Before the world would see it as the worst year since the end of the Second World War, the worst year in my life began in the wee hours of the night between January 26 and 27. Time, the wielder of an all-invasive and censoring broadsword, always has this dark power to cut us in as many shapes and sizes, leaving us tossing like the cut tail of a snake or a lizard. One moment it may privilege us with the look of life in its enamoring hazel eyes, the next moment it has all the possibility of the look of caveman cruelty. It triggers grievous schism that blares out swanky, swirly sermons and twisted teachings. A body under ornamental wreaths and an inconsequential dead leaf off a creeper, both go in a little swipe like a farmer does with a fistful of crop with his sickle.    

Mine was a peaceful, dream-laden sleep. Death’s bony hand conjured a barbaric spiral with its witchy bones cracking, twitching cannibalistically. The hammer strike was terrible in the wee hours of that cold, frigid night. Callously corrupt appear such coincidental conspiracies that chuck out the nostalgic strains of normal life, leaving it meaningless and the enjoyable reigning flavor gone acrid suddenly. We just cry and spit out curse. What else we can do? Can we?

It shattered my little world. Pieces scattered around, I went numb. Lifelong we try to make. It just needs one unexpected strike to break. Bobbing among the new-fangled boisterous metamorphoses, all we are left with is teary lyrics and rosy nostalgia of the wonder years. But life’s evocative momentum, which we aptly assume as the healing hand of time, again sucks us in and again we plunge into the pervasive disillusionment. Again we get strangely mesmerized, getting onto the bandwagon with our youthful strutting and amused festivities.

There I stood like a cold-sodden pony shivering under the bloated baggage of my pain. Come whatever we may try or do, there are always exploitable loopholes for the destiny to ambush us. Try as we can with our hard-nosed negotiations, the impeccably impartial host entertaining us over a sumptuous buffet keeps a traitorous and systematic brutality twisted around his legs under the table like a lethal snake weapon.

There I stood lost, flogged by time with weightiest cruelty. Life was warm under heavy woolens and quilt, my Ma had gone cold forever. Cold waves struck with lusty drifts. Darkness echoed with a metallic voice. My Ma’s body and I stood bobbing back and forth, the drifters painfully drifting to the farthest ends from each other physically. She would live in my memories now nourished by my heart.

I had my crying questions, but in a cosmos where celestial explosions create holes that can accommodate 13 Milky Way sized galaxies, did I even stand justified in putting questions like “Why” and “How”? And even if I questioned, who would answer? It’s beyond the moral matrix that has been offered to us as a remedy in the face of such losses.

O Mother,

My first footstep lies in thy womb,

From such a beginning,

how can I reach a destination wrong?!

I lost my mother at 3 o’clock when the night was old with a new day in its womb. Insufferable pain chillingly ricocheting off, after hitting the softest parts of me, into the unconquered wilderness of the frozen skies. I, who was an oyster safely cocooned and lapped around by the protective maternal shell of Ma, stood with my soft naked skin exposed to the systematic bloodletting of the hissing ghosts waiting with specious glee. The sun that would emerge across the fog and mist would be bespattered with mud for me. The suddenness of the loss was and still is infinitely inexpressible. It was like I was hit hard on the head while in deep sleep by the hand of the unknown with businesslike, puritanical austerity.

Mother, in complete humility and gratitude I bow,

However far you may go,

The rays of your love will light

even the darkest of my night!

I couldn't move. I turned almost dead to the flux of events around. I felt like a terrified, orphan infant whose umbilical cord was torn apart with an angry jerk, exposing my motherless, unprotected body to the infuriating onslaught of pathogens. A kind of savage atrocity! Death certainly has time-honored evidential principles of its own. However, its nasty pitfalls are laid like trapping snares across the twists, turns and evasions on the path, so much so that despite all the knowledge of its inevitability, we are caught brutally unawares as if it was never supposed to happen to us. It felt like I was sinking without any trace. The words of sympathy accosted me warmly in the frigid cold. I was, but, lost within and was grappling in the dark void that had suddenly emerged. Let there be feasts, fairs, flirting, philandering and festivities, the dose of sunshine that sustained me was gone, leaving me with a frozen gaze in the dark.  

Darkness

Too far and deep, I have gone into the pit of gloom,

And lost in the cavernous folds of the impending doom,

Even the brightest big suns now appear too far,

Faint stars these now and just flash their inspiring rays,

Feeble rays reaching me cannot take out the ship caught in treacherous bays,

I know the futility of the beckoning light,

Even in its brightest folds outside, hope is now out of sight,

Now I go deep into my night,

With nobody as a witness to my plight,

All cherished dreams out of sight,

A wingless bird that tried to fly but then crashed from its struggled height,

Now I just silently walk into the dark hold of my night,

Alone

and forlorn,

Insane eccentricities of my soft moan,

Carrying me into the hitherto unreached zone!

֍♠֎

I lost my entitlement to the word ‘Ma’. As you speak out this word, and softly exhale to make the open-mouthed sound, an entire cosmos-load of love enters your existence even while the air goes out. Try this! You will realize what it means to lose ‘Ma’.

After losing my mother, now I really understand and feel what ‘loss’ really is. It simply grips us with blatant prejudice and hauls us onboard like a fisherman disposes netted fish. How flimsy is man’s turf! Suddenly it gets undone by the circumstantial hooves that go rampaging, the satirical riders disparaging, lampooning and demeaning with hard-hitting remarks, relegating the once far-fetched fancies and dreams to inconsequential water bubbles.  

I thought the numerical symmetry of the New Year would bring harmony and peace. After all, 2020 is such a finely balanced number. There is but nicety merely on the surface. It carried a humungous asymmetry inside its orderly shape. A cocky, snappy, jerky and disjointed incoherence was stealthily creeping in the wake of this beautifully balanced number. As the coming months would tell, many an idyllic and romantic trysts would be nipped in the bud by the time’s jumbled journey across the year’s varying seasons.

What new things I learnt at the beginning of 2020? Well, I learnt that whatever we assume to know loses its meaning altogether in the face of the death of a near and dear one. As my mother left her body on the night of 26/27 January, I stood utterly alone, cut off from the womb of existence, a devastated orphan. All my deeply felt spiritual experiences, feelings, realizations, knowledge and information appeared to have lost their meanings. All and everything seemed to possess a theoretical, bookish relevance and stale meaning.

At the bottom of my sorrows, I got into the clutches of ‘meaninglessness’. Meaninglessness may hold the key to the ‘secret’. I understand and feel what it may mean by being shaken by the feeling of not belonging to anything or losing life’s meaning suddenly. It's not a sin to try to create meaning and inculcate a sense of belonging as human beings. These are important tools for the spirits in their bodily form to evolve to the next level. But again even with this realization, I felt lost in the face of my tragedy and even now my own words appear absolutely hypothetical, false, fake and ineffective consolations.

Well, if someone is in a position to nurture and tolerate the feeling of not belonging to anything or anyone and tolerate meaninglessness, it shows her highly evolved spiritual self. I felt and still feel almost meaningless in my existence. Losing one’s mother is a sorrow beyond all sorrows. To the uninitiated, one gets caught in a time warp like a mosquito carcass in the ebullient, spiraling eddies of a flooded river. 

I was gutted even though I tried my level best to provide a philosophical backdrop to the issue of death. How powerless is knowledge and information before our feelings, especially of pain and suffering! Death is inevitable but the way it happened hit me really hard. I was on my spiritual quest. The future appeared an uninterrupted landscape full of fluffy, light-hearted anecdotes, woebegone-time awaiting with a rich mine of long-winded salubrious experiences. Of late, I had been lulled into thinking that some lofty grove full of spiritual fable and fantasies awaited me. In deference to the subverting intellect prodded by the engaging mind, I just gave a carefree look with healthy skepticism as I balanced my faith and reason. Life seemed to offer some sacred themes in whose context the entire life’s losses and disappointments had started to lose their relevance. The losses, pain and sufferings had appeared to look like mere milestones to take me to the point I was heading to. The destination seemed worth all the drudgery life got me into. Then time’s crested wave seared into my life’s body again to undo everything in one clean swipe to turn it into a mere never-ending series of losses. My budding romance with normalcy met an abrupt end.  

My mother is a holy soul and in this body she earned heartfelt appreciation for her conduct by almost everyone who knows her. An active woman, always doing something or the other with a pure heart, she followed her routine without any complain even though her stage of life and living was a tiny platform defined by unsparing patriarchy and the constricting conventions of a conservative society. However, a restful soul learns how to stay unaffected by all the restrictions, constrictions, reprimands and snipes at individual freedom and independence born of a traditional society that sires tragic gender asymmetries. If one is joyful at the core of her soul, I don’t think external situations become the driving force in life.

Hers was an unostentatious and disarming manner as she gently moved around disposing off the crudest of household chores like she was performing some temple rituals. I don’t think that she ever ran after any kind of momentous milestones or events. Most of the women of her generation carry untold humiliations that cauterize their demeanor with a palpable sense of cynicism that they hurl at their own sex as mother-in-laws primarily. It makes intra-woman relationships notoriously tricky. She but remained farthest from the faintest of this atypical feminine cynicism. It was vividly recognized in the neighborhood and people praised her for her calm persona. After all, to retain one’s self respect and stay unaffected by the archetypical male chauvinism of a traditional north Indian society is no little feat. 

A soft smile that stays afloat even among a society beset by strife and turmoil is surely backed by a very strong spirit. Those who don’t react to the typical naggings of domestic life, without getting stupefied by the shackles of anger, are surely on a different wavelength. The core of her being was too sweet to be affected by the bitterness of a hard life that she led. Recurring grim interims hardly affected her inimitable spirit as she reveled in her very own sojourn of life.

I have seen so many people who turn sour and shriveled in spirit after going through only a quarter of what she went through. She but never belittled her past, her journey, her bone-breaking hard work in the fields that could be compared to just cattle, and almost a position of no consequence in the family in lieu of all this. The family itself hatched to the core in its convictions by the iron rules of patriarchy.

A woman in a typical Jat family in Haryana was as good, or as bad, as some cattle in the barn. Even among the best educated families, the male members could not avoid that sardonic expression of superiority. After all, the steely grip of patriarchy was so strong. Although we were counted as atypical Jats with our education, more books than tools in the barn marking the family as out of league with archetypical farmer neighborhood, all this and more wasn’t sufficient to mellow down the biting fangs of a male-dominated society.

She steered her life as the situations allowed and never lost her smile, nor abandoned her marvelous equipoise. I cannot find anyone who ever saw her angry. So many people praise her for her graceful bearing. Her mind always stayed in the tight grasp of her hardworking hands. 

Presently she hadn't any serious issue as such at the health front. On her last day in this body on earth, I marveled at the soft, healthy pinkish glow on her face lit by a dull sun struggling among fog as she gently moved around disposing off her household chores with unbelievable ease and focus. This is the life she had lived for six decades after she arrived in the village as a young bride of 15.

She was a good student in school back at her ancestral place. Her education came to an abrupt halt at the age of 14. She had stood first in her class 8 exams. That was all that she would ever have to do as far as schooling was concerned. The university and post-doc duties awaited her straightaway after her middle class schooling. She would have done far better than most of the male members in the family in academics had she been given a chance to further pursue her studies. Like any other woman of her generation, the decision to continue with studies after marriage was beyond her powers. Now onwards she would read the books of life through brutish hard work in the house, fields and the barn. Broom became her oar to row the boat of life. Fire-tong and blow-pipe became the tools in the geometry box to measure her life with. Spade, scythe and scores of farming tools were her weapons to enable her survive and fight it out in the forest of life. 

As I lay asleep peacefully, some mouthless moth was creeping to gobble down almost the entire portion of my life that defined me. It was a cold, frost-frozen night. Life, trying warmth under woolens, must have become taut with tension as the deadly reptile of mortality crept over the frozen earth, chose our house to sneak in and take away the best jewel in our modest treasury, my Mother. The air was paranormally with tension. Around 2:45 her suffering call tore through my sleeping self. As I jumped up throwing my quilt away I realized there was something terribly wrong. The raw pain in her plaintive note was in resonance with the plain sight of death. It hit me really hard in my guts. I madly ran out from my room. And within minutes she breathed her last in my arms. Driven by the mysterious diktats of mortality, her heart suddenly chose to abandon all its duties to pump compassionate soufflés and throbbing of life. Doctors may call it cardiac arrest, but the death in deed is as shrewd in any means it plots to take away the soul. My yells, my desperate attempts to resuscitate and breathe life into her mouth, my futile attempts to carry her to the hospital in the wee hours of that cold, merciless night, all this hit me so hard in the guts that my system appeared to collapse.

I was almost in a semi-meditative state with my efforts at restfulness on the spiritual path. She was there to look over me like the protective and nurturing hand of divinity. I was like a little child peacefully asleep in her strong, peasant-woman’s arms. The lamp goes off in one cruel whiff of wind. I had been hit hard on my head while in sleep. The shock left me mute and dumb, almost dead to the flux of events around.

When you lose so much in so little of time, you aren’t even left with enough strength to cry, to shed tears, to howl to announce and show to others the extent of your loss. As death growled, blurted and boasted of its plunder and pillage, I sat on my haunches by her side as our neighbors trickled in to be there with my aggrieved self. She would never open her kind, gentle eyes again to shower her unsaid blessings on her son who himself had tuned a middle aged graying man still on the path of seeking his destiny.   

After losing a family member, you never feel that death chucks away the entire existence of the deceased person. There certainly remains something, although in a different dimension which is not within the grasp of our physical senses. There is always a palpable feeling that there is existence beyond the physical shape that we have cremated. Your eyes may be deprived of the sight of a deceased loved one, but the heart is always fragrant with their lively presence so much so that you feel them around. The ambiguity and incertitude about afterlife is no unscalable wall to stop one from honoring, respecting the one who have completed the journey here. Love enables one to leap over the wall of skepticism and nurture fond memories with tears of gratitude and love. These memories make your loved ones far livelier than any physical form around.

We have been tuned and accustomed to measure and lead life by setting goals. To me the biggest goal thinkable was to crawl, so I started crawling with my soul suffering the aftermaths of the strike and body almost giving up in its wake. After crawling, standing up was the goal. So I stood up slowly as acceptance crept in. My unsteady steps changed to a steadier walk as I felt gratitude and love for my most valuable one, Ma. My tears of pain and suffering turned into holy waters of acknowledgement, love and gratitude for being born in her womb. The remembrance of one’s loved ones turns holier than any prayer. My sewn lips parted with a faint smile for her well-meant pure life. My cries changed into a prayer for her journey ahead in the next dimension. I walked now, aiming to jog sometimes, and may be run further on, with her love in my heart and her blood in my veins. Travel safe Ma!

Surrendered like a dead leaf drifting with a strong torrent of water, I fulfilled my ritual duties and offered, and continue to do so whenever I recall her, my deepest prayers for the smooth, painless flow of my mother's journey beyond this body form. All said, I had and still get sad tears of gratitude towards her for having led an active and happy life both in mind and body. Let this beautiful journey lead to a better destination for her consciousness in the journey ahead! Everything said, the scars and the pain remain even as we try to get into the thoroughfare of life and living. Pain and suffering is almost equal to be a human.

She is now part of each and everything around and defines what I make out of ‘Hope, Love and Light’.

The light does hark,

beyond the deepest dark,

There is a day bright,

after the ghostly haunts of a nightmarish night,

After a barren famished fight,

there blossoms a spring-fresh delight,

After the pining pangs of separation,

there is a worthy end to the desperation,

After crashing in the gutters,

there is a surge and rise to bathe in holy waters,

After crying convulsions on the lips,

a smile takes honeyed sips,

After the last defeat,

still there is an undying urge to accomplish the feat,

Even when blind with despair,

there is hope hiding and cajoling somewhere,

Even in hate, love still lurks somewhere!

֍♠֎

The initial motherless months left me clueless to the wiz and wobble of condolence gatherings. I participated in rituals mechanically. The momentum of custom drives us in its wake. While we are unable to move by choice, let custom and conventions take us on. At least we move. Stopping may mean surrendering all rights to life and living.

The mono-culturism of motherhood is so swiping in its care and compassion that it leaves a child almost custom-created by the dreams and deeds of a mother. No wonder, no mother is ever too old even if she turns 100 years of age. To her the son, almost a shriveled old man himself, is as young as the day he was born. Her maternal spirit is ever so young for the life that she nurtured in her womb.

The wildly stylish and flamboyant look of the spike-hairstyled Corona was yet to turn into the planet’s only topic of talk. The world of we humans was still whirring with those typical tales stretched across the spectrum of delight and grief. Even tragedies once repeated too many times come to be taken normally. The exact contours of delight we hardly know. Possibly, our efforts at dozing off tragedies itself looks like delight to us. What else life is? We just scamper around, driven by the laws of self-preservation, to live one more day. So where is fun in all this? Well, unless we view the run for life itself as a fun game. Human mind is greatly suitable for such notions. 

Corona still appeared like your problem, not mine. Little do we realize how close we stand in our miseries and problems as a species in the modern times. Modernity has squeezed we earthlings in a tight box to suffer our miseries collectively at least, if not joy. Individually we may be shrinking too fast into our own psychological world, but when it comes to real dangers, we are like a little group of deer in a tiny place running to escape the predator. Listen o thou firebrand revolutionaries on the cataclysmic path, you may think you are forging utilitarian destinies by taming everything living and nonliving around, but the chink in your armor stays as big as it was for our hunter, gatherer ancestors. Be careful!   

The vast and variegated oeuvre of events carries salubrious ecstasies and pinching tragedies simultaneously. Every crest is supported by a trough. A loss here, gain there, birth here, death there. I read the story etched with the chisel of detachment by Mother Nature in the nest among the beautiful hardy, heart-shaped leaves of the Parijat tree in the compound. The carcass of a new chocolate colored, hairless hatchling lay on the ground under the nest as an ant feed. It was served there as a tasty pudding on the table for a still smaller world. The infantile wings that would never kiss free air in the open skies. But millions of tiny ant steps will be created to crawl and heave the chariot of life in the dust in lieu of this missed chance of free flight in the skies.

The parents will miss a new life's eager chirps to take an independent flight. In the indifferent womb of Mother Nature such stories are ever unfolding. The globular grass house of the Spotted Munia will be emptier. For one week, it sounded a house full of noisy toddlers as parents ferried baby food throughout the day. From the jingling notes emanating from the grass house, I could make out at least two birdie kids. How easily the snooping urge for an extra bite from the parent’s beak turns into a snare of self-annihilation! The lunge and grasp for life turning into a dive of death almost naturally. Sadly sighed the air pregnant with ambiguity and mystery. The branches shook as if in agreement with some existential monologues.

So one of them toppled down—its fall to death being its only flight, taking it swiftly through its little journey—and its shape of matter was now melting and transforming into thousands of ants as they jumped onto the ever-throbbing stage of the infinite series of matter/energy transformations.

I could hear a feeble trail of lonely notes, almost groggy with sadness, coming from the nest. There was supposed to be at least one birdie toddler there, wondering why the house has become silent and emptier. In this ever-flowing stream of energy, the selfless love, like here shown by the birdie parents, creates temporary loops of thriving lumps of life. Out of many possibilities, the impenetrable, secret doctrine of Mother Nature unfolds endless pictures on the fluid canvas; the multihued pictures that we humans, due to our limited sense perception, see through the prism of pleasure, pain, agony and ecstasy. Well, that's what makes us humans.

The sight of the little hatchling turning into a lively ant swarm appeared a sad interjection in the tiny birdie phrase here. But then I expected to be happy if at least one hatchling took on the journey of an adult, crossing the grassy threshold and fly into the uncharted skies. Like a huge birch tree in pristine forests produces millions of seeds in its lifespan of a few hundred years. Out of all these possibilities, if even a single seed germinates to be an adult like the mother tree, it's called a successful reproduction cycle. Similarly, multiple chirps jingle musically in a nest, and at the most one note carries the song ahead to keep the story alive and kicking. Well, that's how life is my dear friends!

As I opened myself to the stories of loss and gain in nature, I could feel it reciprocated to cheer me up. Or Ma tries to lift the pal of gloom from her hatchling’s head by the lullaby vision of a flower’s reddest lipstick and the muse of a Himalayan Yogi, the latter unchaining the majestic spirit of some long-held sprout in a dormant soot.

It looked a blissful creative moment. A baby-soft sapling of life, love and living held out its tiny baby finger to hold onto the mighty, grand old hand of mother creation. Well, all is well that ends well! Actually, the brooding banyan plant appeared to have gone into an otherworldly detachment. The winter rains lashed. I also showered my affection. The sun also beat down nutritional beams during silvery noons. It but won't come out of its trance. Like a famished yogi in a Himalayan cave, it shed all its leaves, keeping just one leaf as a sign of its still remaining attachment to this world. I gave up hope, being prone to turn pessimistic after my irremediable loss.  But then the yogi slowly opened its eyes after many months and saw this fleeting world through its softly sprouting eyes. Its tiny shoot looked pampered and carefully cradled by the fabulous late winter breeze. I welcomed Yogi Maharaj back to this sweet sour worldliness! It gave me a spoonful of joy after months.

When not too much is advancing in life in addition to the wound you are carrying that is ever reminding you of your loss, it helps to open up to the vast canvas of mother existence. Then even the sprouting of a belated bud provides a sense of gain. It sets the ball rolling for some feeble traces of joy. Obsessive grip of sadness prevailing through painstaking months loosens its grip, giving you some space to get your foothold. The majestic underpinnings of the little, unknown anecdotes hold out a ray of hope. All we have to do is to keep our eyes open.  

Human coquetries, kindly come out of the gutter of self-importance! A little piece of flaming red drew my attention from a corner in the garden. She had the reddest lipstick! Ladies stay away! There wasn’t any competition at all. She was a winner all and out. Keep smiling my girl, Canna Indica aka Keli, you win the pageant! I kissed this palpable emblem of love and the sub-text of another loss—creeping along the main text of the loss of my mother—was overwritten by the unconditional love of this little flower. I felt the injury to my heart by this ‘other loss’ during the cruel winter months was healed for a while. A spirit of redemption and resilience smiled through the flashing red of the flower. The grandeur of selfless love smiling through flowers helps to an extent but the tyranny of slighted love would still swirl and cascade, claiming its portion of agony in my heart, smoldering for months and years before it would die some day. Ah, the flailing, almost mythological repertoire of wounded love! It churns the soul amid the rigors of love, hate, contempt, fury, sorrow, courage, fear, disgust, wonder, utter restlessness and even peace, all and still more. Unfathomable is the mystery and mystification of a wounded heart pierced by the arrow of spurned love. A tale starting from torrid passion and amorous, surging love redolent with soulful cooing; only to end in the stagnant, stale swamps of contemptuous, hegemonic and falsifying waters. The pain stalks with its stealthy elegance and persists with its needling ingenuity to give a mesmerizing, addictive sting, a kind of drug dependence for a big portion of heart. Meticulous are the under-shadows of the long-lost love. It evokes and inspires reminiscent tones, which although forgetful and frail, are still lovably precocious, wholesome, awkward and on top of all tortuous.      

We have to learn to smile with our pains. If we don’t do this, the pain will satirically extol its gloomy tale and get in nexus with the entire set vital life force coursing through our veins. A smile is a dissenting activist right in the middle of this naysayer’s path. It is the speed-bump against the heady, dramatic shock elements that will otherwise lay claim to the entire path of life. Smile, the shadowy artist, it accomplishes far too much for its little size on our lips. It moves with ease and élan and takes charge of serious affairs in a lighter vein.

There was someone who retained a full smile even with a broken self. I stared at its injury, my own wound turning me open to the injury of a soft cuddly reddish branch. Its supple, thin spine was almost broken, a large portion of the branch gone, almost decapitating it. Forgetful and forgiving, it but decided to move on. A little leafy bandage of hope and resurgence sprouted around the wound; a sort of bridge to keep the juice of life eager to move on and realize its full blossom at the tip where a flower would smile triumphantly. It was the flag-post of life and living. The accidental storm had snapped her spine, leaving it almost crippled, the injury strikingly etched on the soft fiber. It had all the reasons and an entire set of self-justifications to drop weapons and wither out. It but decided to live with a vigorous sleekness. And in this manner, dear readers, the brave Pink Purslane (Portulaca Pilosa) aka Kiss-me-Quick had her last smile. She had won it. Her crumbling tower stacked against the rarity of her choice. A beautiful pink flower smiled in full flashy youth as an exemplification of smile over tears. She had retained her smile and pouted forth with an inspirational 'Kiss-me-Quick' tale of forgetting pains and conquering blooming heights.

What an inspirational story portrayed in a little corner by the slender strand of this pink ground cover flower. A clear winner, all and out. The snapping, breaking tragedy melted into the background. The flower reclaimed her canvas to paint herself a bright smile. Well, that's a humungous life lived. What a smile against the breaking odds! To live a life giant-sized, one need not have a huge stage. All it needs is a steely spirit. A smile surfaced on my lips that appeared to have forgotten this blissful curve of feeling good.

The smile surfaced and was then slurped like a small insect getting pulled down by a chameleon’s tongue. A Broken Egg steals the scene. It drew the close-up sketch of the lurking futility that threw asunder the spirit of the jus-regained smile. A poignant streak of loss overshadowed the gain in the fresh banyan sapling and the red flaming flower. It’s very difficult to avoid reverting to our discriminatory human ways involving our emotions, likes and dislikes. How I wish I could hold the monkey by its ear and give some exercise to my grandpa's oldest walking stick to gift the monkey the reddest bum on earth for he happened to be the slayer of my smile!

My newfound smile was eaten by a bleeding crack that robbed the winged prospects of airy swirls by a birdie life. The broken egg of White Throated Munia bore testimony to fate’s obsession with creation and destruction with the same precision. For weeks the parents matched the human efforts in building a skyscraper and built a safe globular grassy nest. Their feeble preening chirps looked up to the upcoming more onerous duties of raising hatchlings. Then the storm came. Well, not windy. It was rather let loose by our genetic ancestor, the errant kid on the ladder of evolution, presently at a stage where we Homo sapiens were a few millenniums back. It’s baffling to see how self-important, ego-centric and demented monkeys emerge in playing uncalled for truant. Their stomach is forever rumbling with hunger for more and more mischief. They despise the entire set of morals and ethos in the cosmos. No wonder, their tomfoolery very easily tapers into plain villainy. On the precipitous road of evolution, they have taken it too seriously to keep pace with Homo sapiens. While the rest of the species fight merely for food and procreation, our genetic match goes beyond these two essentials to jump into misbehavior, fun and revelry.

Out of a big horde that had raided the village, with most of the females proudly carrying their little ones stuck to their bellies, one gallant jumped into the tree bearing the nest. The wood was soft. The erudite interventionist against the path of peace and sanity hurled his storming passion onto the poor little tree. The branches crackled. The leaves drizzled like a quick shower. The mischief-monger must have enjoyed the free-spirited articulation of villainy like we humans do in our polished ways. The poor tree was severely jolted. It stood shaken with dulled spirits, many branches broken and soft saplings slain. The nest was critically unhinged. The goon then scanned the wreckage for some morning time fluidy lollipop. I am sure it hardly had the patience to even look seriously inside and take out what it intended to do while breaking the nest. A monkey carries the feeble imprint of human tendency to play errant to draw a strange sip of gratification. So the nest was blown apart. The eggs tossed around like tiny plops and shelled projectiles.

Here lay the cracked egg to undo my feeble smile. Out of duty-bound instinct, the parents still flitted around the broken nest entangled in the branches. This is loss. Just that they don't suffer like we humans. It’s simply because they do all this without any sense of gain, thus avoiding all the pain in its wake.

There is a difference between pain and suffering. They feel the instinctual pain of it, of course. But they don't suffer like we humans do. Simply because they just follow the call of cosmic intelligence while putting that selfless labor in setting up the nest to rear hatchlings. They don't have a sense of gain guiding their routine errands unlike we humans. As all experiences stand on the scale of duality, so in the absence of a clear cut sense of gain and profit, the sense of loss can't sustain beyond the momentary instinctual pain. And that saves them from the perpetual agony and suffering of we humans, whose major portion we hurl into our environment and society. The main segment of what mankind does to nature is born of his own inner discontent and suffering.

Well, these are the perils of being overactive within a cocoon. We wrap ourselves with our insecurities and insulate from the larger dimension of life and living. The lovable mystique of life gets overlaid with embarrassingly trite, moron personage. Misery entails in its clichéd way. Lost is that warm-hearted clarity that the existential forces so kindly infused in our genes to enable us become the pinnacle of creation.   

The specks of pleasure and pain are scattered around in equal measure. Or maybe there is no such thing as pleasure and pain. It’s merely our perception. We just pick and choose to be joyful sometimes and turn gloomy oftentimes.

Just at the moment my smile got beaten by the garish style and suspense of the simian thievery, a Laotsian bird pulled the swing again to lift my spirits. Our emotions keep on enjoying their time on the quirky see-saw that intersperses the unfathomable corridors of our existential self.

A master camouflage meant that the clownish monkey missed it completely. I drew solace from the fact that at least this one stayed out of danger. It was the smallest of a rag-tag, inconsequential nest, almost like the few remaining sinews of the oldest of a nest. A pulse of life was throbbing to bide precious time. Each beat counted. It meant a huge step towards free-winged flights in a few days. For life at this level, each second counts. It was a laughing dove hatchling.

Well, a dove is a dove indeed, a silent most and stoic bird. I always wondered how come they even survive as the rest of the birds appeared to be angrily, enthusiastically and energetically competitive to pounce upon whatever was on offer on the stage of life bearing the drama of survival. Doves look like the ascetics of the birdie world, always sitting silently on the laid back side-lane. I even laughed at them for being so lazy simpletons, having witnessed seemingly half-hearted attempts at patching up a famished little nest of thin, dry neem stems. It looked barely enough to let the mother put its paws in the middle, leaving the rest of her body out. But then I also had some inkling about mother existence's ways of squaring up things even in those apparently weak cases where the odds appear terribly against them. Now this hatchling held onto the thread of life almost unseen, barely at a height of 8-9 feet. Cats had been duped. Even a greater coucal, ill famed for spotting the tiniest of nests among the foliage, sat a few yards away on the wall, missed it and flew away without any breakfast. Wonderful!

Well, these are Laotsian birds indeed. They win by not fighting directly. Their strength is their patience, composure and calmness. They go about their nesting business almost imperceptibly shorn of any typical birdie business of parentage that creates a ruckus around. After the hatching, the already famished nesting hut had lost many more sinews to make it look like the useless wreckage of a many season old little nest. And on its edge, lost in the colors of deception, throbbed the prospect of a winged life. The only clue to what was going on being the chuckling, musing song of the laughing dove couple from a distance. They hardly raised a commotion and rarely used foul words when I checked out their little household, as if under a mystical realization that that which can't be cured, must be endured. They stoically did what they could, and watched over the unmanageable without that typical browbeating of angry, irritated birds.

Just imagine, the last season an oriental white eye had patched up the littlest of a nesting cup. It was a wonder of nesting architecture, so small and beautifully embedded with cotton swabs and well-tested grass fiber. It hung so smugly hidden under the leaves. But its symmetry turned it outstanding. The predatory caucal spotted it, leaving me flabbergasted how come its radar caught this few grams of grassy cup weaved with such effort. And now this apparently clumsy assemblage of few dry twigs and pieces of dry grass, in the branches of a small tree, barely 8-9 feet above the ground, and not even hidden too much in the foliage, carried its success story so far.

The altruistic attitude of doves takes them onto a path of surrendering spontaneity, a sort of open hearted acceptance, which hardly creates ripples on the stage of life, allowing them to carry out such a cute coup. Well, maybe they laugh so cutely, in full understanding of some eternal law of restfulness, to be named laughing turtles. Even laughing Buddha would be proud of them. Possibly, they laugh at this world competing on the scales of complexity, while they laze around in the hazy sunshine of late winters and let out rib-tickling trails of their chuckling notes into the cool air to undo a bit of seriousness from stiffened faces.

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Well, all of us have to somehow learn to recover, recuperate, re-surge and rejuvenate. All of us have to manage bloodless revolution within, slaying the enemies inside. We have to win over the habitual and instinctual acquiescence and servitude to our fears and phobias. On the apron of darkness, we have to create bright signposts and come of age all ablaze with lights.

What if the roomful of miseries appear immovable at the moment? Understood that the room having thick walls is beyond your might to shift and change its proportions. You cannot push its walls to change its shape and modify the interiors. You might even be incapable of removing the darkness inside, having lost the light of enthusiasm, the sunrays of your will power, and the brightness of your passion. It is not necessary to be a revolutionary fighter all the time. You can very well sit in a still darker corner of the room full of your own miseries, most of them invisible to the uncaring world outside. But then sitting in a dead dark corner counts to be dead and we have no business to be dead before we actually die. Temporary shelter in the lap of a deathlike stale corner might be of some utility, but not more than allowing the tears and anguish of self-pity and helplessness to flow out through the feeling of being a victim.

Once this little puss is out of the system, it has no further purpose in one’s life. A little bit of crying after being overpowered by the feeling of victimization helps. Crying helps in letting out the salt from your injuries. It also clears the eyes. After the watery outpour, you are supposed to see better and clearer. You have been on the hospital bed, taking a bit of rest for the diseased, afflicted self, now you are supposed to step down, wear your slippers and walk away to claim what you lost while you were forced to take a rest.

Looking beyond your dark corner in the dark room with immoveable walls, you can at least open the windows that either you or the situational winds have banged shut. Do not move walls, do not even try to bang against the locked door, just open the openable window to allow a bit of light, to expose yourself to the fine traces of brightness that will surely burn the fire in you again. It will definitely ignite your passion, enthusiasm and will power lying dormant.

If you cannot lift your roomful of miseries on your head and throw it miles away, you can surely lift little-little signs of your worth and capabilities lying around your feet in the dark and look at these against the light from the just-opened little window. These are the imperishable seeds; these cannot die, and will surely grow into luxuriant harvest, provided you give them the moisture of your feeble self during the re-germination phase.

You might not be able to laugh to the full contentment of the self, but you can smile at the little world outside your tiny peeping window. Even the slightest semblance of smile will do. These are the buds that will surely blossom into full laughing flowers later on. Your hands might not be still ready to go agog and start breaking the mightiest boulders around. But you can raise your hands and wave gently at the world outside, it will wave back with grace and acknowledgement, giving back its share with kindest interest. You might not be still ready for the marathon, but you can shuffle your feet and count your steps and listen to your slow pace between the walls. It will prepare you for the longest journey that you might take. It will be a prelude to your first step on the winnable journey that you will definitely take.

Close your eyes and with an open heart accept your share in making things dark in the room. Nobody is perfect and we just have the bigger or smaller share in our miseries. We cannot change the universe, but we can definitely bring about a little reformation in our own self. You might not be able to overhaul your personal self, but you can definitely change tiny bits of life in general. It will blow up the wrong shades, leaving you a totally different person.

Close your eyes again and think of your positives, your advantages, your good qualities. There will be many I’m sure. Look around with a gentle glance, these must be somewhere around. You will surely spot them. Smile at the little basketful of your skills, strengths and capabilities. These are your weapons to help you win through the upcoming battles and wars. A mere acknowledgement of their existence will do at this stage. Just caress your qualities and look at these with a proud smile.

These and many little things will help you. Forget about bigger things. These little seeds will grow into a bigger harvest. Just gather these seeds, hold them, they will take you back to the bigger world of baleful of roles, responsibilities, praise and achievements.

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Dear readers, there definitely is the Gateway to the Heaven open to all of us. There is surely a methodical chart to overcome the threshold of individual consciousness. We have to come out delightfully spinning out of the darkish lanes and by-lanes and set course for some dream drive. But some fundamental and unwritten laws of existence—unlike the written laws of man-made physical sciences—definitely help one on the course.

We have to remember that nothing stands in isolation. Can a drop of water stand alone in the ocean? Can an ocean exist without a drop, i.e., with a hole in its heart and the drop missing? Same is the cosmos. It’s one, singular continuity cascading around in one or the other form. The sea is nothing but a conglomeration of drops in the expansion of its geographical spread. Same is with the super-sea of cosmic consciousness. It’s merely a congregation of individual consciousnesses sprinkled everywhere. Now the question is: how come there is a perception of one’s individual consciousness? Well, that's how the fabric is! Start dividing a sea into tiniest dots! What happens? All we have is littler seas made of tinier drops! The threshold from individual to infinite intelligence exists and doesn't at the same time. Possibly the sea itself perceives itself like a drop. Divide it into countless drops; they retain the feeling of individuality.

Individual consciousness is thus nothing but a point of perception in the transforming whirlpool where the elements are going cyclically. Is a drop fundamentally and qualitatively different from a big sea? It isn't!

Now, let us take the case of humanoids. The so called conscious is the littlest bit of perception surrounded by the subconscious, which in turn melts into the infinite intelligence and consciousness pervading all around. That's the ladder to spread yourself to feel more meaningful. One's subconscious part of mind is most active just before sleep and immediately after waking up. That's when the gates open tangibly for taking a quantum jump from conscious to subconscious and further on into super-consciousness. Grab it. Put your affirmation and claim a larger self.

There are infinite possibilities. What you seek at your greediest best may not be more than a drop of water desiring to double its size. You have the pathway etched to be the sea itself. You already are. Just that all that remains to be done is to start seeing through the walls of conscious, watch eagerly through the windows of subconscious in those walls and get connected to the infinite right there in front of you.

It's suitable to start with tangibles to break the virtual shackles, just like it's easier to start with body in yoga. The higher battles with more virtual demons are managed further on the path. At the mind front, it's more convenient to start with the conscious part because it's tangible through its operational branch in the form of thoughts and emotions. There starts the second tier of management leading to the subconscious part and further on to be out of the prison to come united with everything around.

It's not mother existence's concern whether there are storms lashing a drop, pond or sea, or peaceful calm waters pervade. To her indiscriminating eyes, all things are just as they are. What occurs in the little drop of our consciousness is solely our own concern. We create the storms as well as peace in the tea cup of our existence. And the tools to make and break are conscious thoughts and their shadows in the form of emotions and feelings. They majorly decide the energy pattern pervading across this specific blueprint of awareness, this small arrangement of energy within the super-sea of energy.

Pain, suffering, disease, stress and tensions are mere effects, little obstructions in the flow of river, the life stream of energy conglomeration that we term as physical body. And the repair work primarily begins from the conscious part of the mind, which operates through thoughts, emotions and feelings. So just like you go gymming for your body, go gymming with thoughts in order to have a healthier mind. Work like a mason and etch your reality, your better self on the subconscious facade, which in turn reflects as your truth on the endless canvas hung around with its infinite dimensions. Good luck!

I know I might be accused of oversimplifying something fundamentally challenging! You may laugh that I'm asking you to ping Bill Gates each day going to bed and waking up, as if you have some hotline handy. You may even reprimand me by saying, 'Crawling out of my materialistic mess and rising to lofty heavens! Is that really so easy?! Shedding off all the past karma! Isn't it like having to first sail through all of its roller coaster effects and then arrive at the ladder to lofty heavens?'

I truly understand your point my dear reader! But you have to be open to mine also! The yogic practices enable one to rectify lots and lots of energy blocks born of the past and present karmic debts attached to an individual consciousness. There are two ways: either allow things to take their natural course, or forge an alternative reality, totally brand new, free from the karmic debt through concerted, aware and hyper-conscious effort. In the former, we are a mere creation of circumstances; the latter, on the other hand, puts us in the league of a creator, the conscious designer of circumstances. The choice is always ours!

But then you may still retain your skepticism and counter: 'From a myriad of spiritual practices available, how would a novice pick out the most suitable one? Which path to take? Is it okay to leave the path of devotion (bhakti), unconditional surrender, and step up to yogic sadhana, the path of active karma?'

Well, in order to evade perpetrating apostasy, thus avoiding tremendous endeavor to topple your beliefs, my simple, self-effacing and gentle explanation is all that I can offer as of now. Bhakti marg, the path of devotion, is the easiest one. But we have to understand that to completely believe in something, we have to un-clutter our subconscious mind of the routine fears and insecurity bred by rampant thinking and logical reasoning of the conscious part of our mind. To be receptive and surrendering is a blissful state. But how many of us can be true believers in modern times? Not many I’m sure! We may think that we are firm believers hypothetically, as a kind of theory-driven conceptualization, but disbelief lurks as a subversive, radical figure and that undoes all effect. The eagle-eyed erudite strategist is always drawing the contours of last-minute-doubts. Our apparently infallible faith develops cold feet and crashes like a sand castle. All we are left with are some face-saving moral prescriptions that we again use to get busy with the complex art of strengthening the breached bulwarks of our faith.  

The theorizing compulsions of the modern education, anti-humanism bred by unsparing competitive culture, a dehumanized society perpetually intermeshing between the grindstones of sweat and blood and scores of problems have put our mind burdened with anxiety, fear, insecurity, discontent, restlessness and tension. Where is the space for faith and true belief to germinate? Bhakti yoga is for all those whose subconscious mind is already in a position where most of the shadows don't exist. Some ennobling, intensely humane fragrance is reaching out from the enduring flower blossomed in the garden of with-ness with a larger dimension of feeling.

Oppositely, for the educated people, whose minds have been bombarded with unchecked whats and whys of life, and the consequent insurrectionary anxiety and complexity of the mind, they need some conscious efforts to somehow clear the ground to begin with. The modern mind is bruised and burdened under merciless cold hard facts, figures, knowledge and information, and hence least qualified to be a proponent of the Bhakti yoga. To cut iron, one needs iron. These are the phantoms of mind. It needs going down there with a conscious effort and do a bit of de-weeding first.

Surely our mind must be the universe. What we know and understand of the cosmos is just a projection of our mind. The basic building blocks of life, our own and the rest of collective realities are mental building blocks being stone-worked in the mind-workshop. Thoughts are energy movements much as you have anything tangible on the physical surface. This is no mystical talk! Ask quantum physicists, they will tell you that the erstwhile fundamental entities, atoms, are not the basic entities at all. They are 'events' only. Virtual is not that virtual as we presume. It's a mammoth stone-masonry going on in the unseen subterranean cavern, laying out the foundation of our life and living. So guys be firmly in charge of your thoughts. They make and break! This existence doesn't care whether you choose to make or break. Just that we ourselves suffer, if we end up breaking.

So the question of whose Truth is nearest to the Ultimate turns redundant.

The unseen dust of Truth is scattered till eternal distances in the universe, multi-verse or whatever it qualifies to be. Out of this infinite option to pick up and churn out a semblance of individual truth, the so called perceivable reality, the human mind also creates virtual reality defined by the neurons firing in the brain. Mind you, it's as simple as you see exciting games in virtual reality applications. There is hardly any qualitative difference.

So we have our realities, some of which have been gathered to form collective realities in order to run this society in the form of common beliefs, social norms and conventions. We can't help this. This mind has to churn out our own individual reality, the so called our very own dear truth. That can't be helped. Our own truth almost seems to define the meaning of our life. Well then here starts the real problem. One's very own truth may sound a character assassination to someone from his/her point of view decided by their own truth.

Why do we hurl out our truths? Possibly it's a kind of survival mechanism. We probably try to unburden ourselves by letting it out. But man, our truth, the jewel it may appear to us, may be a dagger to someone else. Avoid unsheathing it even if it turns a knife inside your own self and starts cutting your own innards because if it’s out, it can hurt someone even more. Why should someone else be its target? It's the keeper's responsibility to manage it. Accepted that if kept inside, it will be painful, but it will cut many falsehoods inside your own self, side by side giving a few painful cuts to the softer tissues. It but saves you from committing a verbal manslaughter.

Good people prefer injury to their own self instead of harming others. And mind you, this can be practiced. My post-traumata resolution in advance: To keep my version of reality to myself, even if it hurts. It's my responsibility to retain it, to manage it, to nurture it. Our jewel may be dagger to someone else. Be careful about your simple facts that you may hold as mere harmless bits of truth, for these might be character assassinating poison arrows to someone else. It's not about the other person; the onus is on one's own self. So guys, here I go and keep my truths to my own self. That's the path of solitude. Possibly it leads to a place where even the last doubts vanish! God bless you all!

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Corona was still a tale of other lands and politics was in its full flavor, the sign of a society stirred by the mundane ladle of modern-day maladies. As people like you, me and all and sundry mango men of India, the quintessential aam admi, heaving the cart of survival with arthritic groans, and shaped almost as dimwitted sluggards by the vile implant of unsparing economy resulting in financial neuroses, further creating a disastrous disharmony between mind and emotions, the smarter race, i.e., crafty politicians, romp the stage to sugar-coat their half-truths and quarter-truths. A politician may take any sudden summersault, even criminally carved down, and still retain a firm hold on reasonableness. Amazing is their selected surefootedness. Glorious is the benevolently beaming visage above an interior abuzz with silent snorts and whipping voice of many a hidden stratagem.

A deadly queer plot hung behind the flimsy vanities of the late winter curtains. Delicate-toed routine life was slowly land-sliding into the pit dug at the utter end of collective dilemma. Compulsively and earnestly the humanity was heaving itself on the distinguishably ancient path, with lulled spirits and absorbed in a kind of sedate luxury and refreshing pleasures. As the coming times will tell, the colossal propellers of change were building with a whirlwind rapidity. The chronological watershed, AC—BC, would stand dethroned. Christ would be replaced by the new evil God of darkness.  

A fine flicker, carrying the core of the Devil’s perpetual disfigurement, was tiptoeing through the darkness to cast grey curse over the rumic charm and sumptuous splendor of the world of we humans helplessly hemmed in by lusty loops of our desires, insecurities and phobias. Tactfully scraped earth and the rutted gravel would be raised into a storm by the fiery fiesta leaving we earthlings mis-stepping into a mischance. The silvery spear of the fiendishly subtle spiked ball from the land of reddish, fictitious fiasco will cut through the drowsy dewdrops and the rapturous bloom of the spring’s ballerina with polished exactitude.

As a grisly groaning precursor to the testing times waiting in the wings for jumbled pleasures, the wailing wish of political alliances went into an ominous tailspin. Shrewdly sown are the political seeds for incalculable bounties, out of which some carnival concessions are sprinkled over the masses like a one-minute delicate drizzle in a desert.

Is it ever about Right or Wrong in politics? Shiv Sena ditched BJP and allied with NCP and Congress to grab the throne of Maharashtra. There are limitless possibilities in politics and the gallant khadi-clad warriors resolutely and freely prowl the nights. After the frenzied straddling and vibrant growl of the night, our netas have the skill to welcome the day with exceptional innocence of a pure-hearted child. Any limit of any sort is too weak for our resourceful politicians. All and sundry ideological principles are laid to smithereens like uprooted banyans. They cash on we common people’s flamboyant stupidities. Their U-turns arrive with excruciating suddenness. The genial ghosts lurking in their spirits are gallantly pumping their massive desires.

So now Shiv Sena is a bit more secular, or call it an iota lesser Hindutvavadi. It appears a secular miracle. The Congress and the NCP are a fragment less secular and an ounce of more Rightist, much for the cause of God’s greatest glory. The BJP would have adjusted anything ranging from less or more secularism to less or more nationalism to stir its constituents in the political cauldron to form government in Maharashtra.

Stupefying somersaults! Their sinuous twists jovially take a ride over the masses’ curved lassitude and stringent frailty. They appear to possess some celestial scalpel to cut open a substantial portion from the miserable public busy in scraping a living.  

So guys, beyond the smokescreen of ideology and all, the only recipe to power and privilege turns out to be the plain old, bland pragmatism and practicality. So my dear voters, when this pragmatism for power is written so brilliantly in the sky for all of us to read and understand, why don't you guys also demand electricity, water, roads, hygiene, less pollution and scores of other basics of life, instead of just hallucinating under the spell of hypothetical opium to gratify misplaced ego through fights over caste, class, creed, religion, etc. When you know that our netas will go to any extent to retain power, why don't you demand the common day-to-day amenities to help your life and living? If you demand seriously, they will do it I am sure now after witnessing their limitless capacity to adjust to stay in power.

So guys, now is the time to come out of willful blindness and turn kingmakers and demand your share against your vote. Frightfully prolonged has been the mass apathy. We have been stuffed and gorged with a brooding abundance of issues that have hardly any relation to our wellbeing. Now is the time to demand the little things that facilitate the life of a common man. Forget about never-to-be-seen magical items flung into your face with hallucinating hyperbole by the tricksters wearing magic hats! Political battles then will be fought over issues such as employment, health, education, pollution and such other matters that are infinitely spiraling to keep the public’s fate wretchedly wilting under the stern gaze of unmet basic necessities and unyielding hard times. Let it be a politics of substance and solidity instead of fumbling phrases giving a clue to vague glimpses of some psychotropic reality.

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Sheathed in the eternal sorrows and the stillest silence of my pain, nibbling like a wriggly worm at the succulent scraps of her memories, I miss the dumplings Ma made on a rainy cold-lashed day! They were as warm and tasty to soothe the stomach as her kind and compassionate touch was to the soul. And dear brothers and sisters, thus went the wintery caravan. There are definite signs of climate change lurking publicly now with a leery, lingering look of savagery! Unprecedented fires somewhere and icy blizzards at other places try to tell the last lines of the tale. Thousands of hectares of Amazon forests charred to ashes, Mother Earth’s lungs catching the cancer born of the human virus of unchecked growth. The Australian forests took over the baton then and miles after miles turned to ashes. The trees burnt and so did the Koalas and their forest companions. The Siberian snows melted midway in winters leaving the polar bear stranded in the middle of nowhere. Siberia had temperature more than 30 degree Celsius. Here, in north India, it was unprecedently frozen. What was happening!?

If some non-Homo sapiens is given the voice to evaluate we humans, we would be showered with extreme and unparalleled infamy, our acts of wickedness bearing a testimony to all the dark eulogies that would fall in our kitty. With our swarming, sartorial elegance of brains, we Homo-sapiens beat other species of the genus Homo to rule and crowd the planet to its last guts. Wait brothers wait, great are the ways of evolution. Evolution doesn't end with Homo-sapiens. It's but a brief coma, a tiny pause, a cute little interlude before the juggernaut moves on further. It’s a cascade of varying colors this cosmic continual. We may still be bemused and entranced, disputatiously holding our arguments, as the Greater Cause coddles us along with mild chastisements for our collective sins. Our absurd pretence and self-flattery will be cut into two by the bigger laws with incisive clarity. Our undoing will sprout from all our doings. Our restlessly nimble feet will run into a trap. The artificial intelligence (AI) will sow the seeds of an almost different type of species of the genus Homo. The great AI will do us what we did to other species in manipulating nature and depriving them of their natural rights.

It seems almost inevitable: the doomsday scenario born of the unchecked ambitions of the Homo sapiens. Well, that doesn’t mean we turn our face from the breathtaking elegance life has to offer even in these dire straits. Let the immortal torchbearer of light shining with incorruptible luster, holding the cosmic order with compelling sincerity and triumphant tranquility, look to this bigger issue. We can still allow our nightmares and fears melt in the gentle heat of real-life stories played by people like Lata Bhagwan Khare. They are the ones whose grand spirit still throws a silver lining across the dark clouds. The astounding resonance, the scented solemnity, the essential exactitude of their effort at the process of creating meaning out of life turns the gloomy tide into ecstasy and rejuvenescence. We appear devilish collectively no doubt presently. However, there are Godly flickers that hold the clue what we could have been.   

The very same indomitable spirit chiming with stupendous exaltation and multitudinous mirth, which in its collectivity saw us rise to the top on the planet, and hence leave us dangerously darting forth on the path of unrestricted plunder of the booty after the victory, turns it glorified and shiny like a fairy on the divine pathway when seen dancing in full potential and incessant imagination in a particular human being.

The individual is an old woman. Due to the spasmodic seizures of transcendental peculiarities—that leave us disadvantaged right from the beginning, our birth—she hadn't anything as per the sternly exacting scale of measure modern-day life and evaluate its mirth. Swarmed by the perilous swoops of poverty, each day coming with abysmally varied challenges, rib-tickled by the gnawing protestations of unmet basic needs, she hardly had anything. Well, not in the terms we are used to evaluate possessions. Age wasn't on her side. She was 65 already. The insoluble granite of poverty perched in her soul, the biggest disadvantage, left her horizontally, vertically, circularly (in fact in all shapes and sizes) disadvantaged! But she had wealth dear readers, a big mountain of it, in terms of subtle intangibles. Some tireless tranquility deep inside, unfazed by the tumultuous retorts of daily dose of deficits destiny held out for her, glowed with panoramic luminescence.

She had courage, conviction and abundant vigor that allow life to be a blissful romance even if there is hardly any reason to feel so in terms of social standing and material possessions. And most importantly, she loved her husband. The mystifying monologues of just being with each other rounded off most of the hard edges that destiny had created for them. The splendorous vision of that unshakable chemistry swiped away the majority of dark shades from their lives.

They were a simple farming couple in a Maharashtra village, happy in earning a day’s wage and look forward to another hard-worked but peaceful day. When you learn to stay happy and joyful in the present, life turns a string of shiny beads. Past doesn’t pinch you, the future doesn’t scare you. Life but will have its share of tests and challenges. So, like all of us face it sooner or later, they also faced one. The 70-year-old farm laborer fell sick. Death seemed to serve a notice to the husband. Streams of itching fragility crept over his body as the local PHC attendant expressed his helplessness in restoring his health and held out a list of costly tests at a big city hospital.

The tests and the treatment meant almost that much amount of money which the poor couple hadn't seen in their entire life. But she, a life-long equal partner in his life and living, was sure that she had to save her husband at any cost. He may die, like all of us will one day, but not on account of the unavailability of medical treatment. Her love for him laid down its command with a flowery emphasis.

When people far younger and far more privileged would have lost hope and surrendered to desperation, she saw chance at life in the Marathi headlines on a greased local newspaper piece she was using to hold the samosa they were eating at the crowded bus stand after visiting the city hospital. The centuried halo of mass apathy twirled among the stomping dust and noise with a sharply censorious clanging chime where all were alone despite being jutted almost body to body in a swarm of humans. Mankind, the hypercritical perfectionist, got further and further into the endless myriads of his own solutions to the problems he created. Superfluous modifiers engaged with chickadee and clang. Despite all the claims to be the supreme species on earth, everybody looked like a straggler scurrying for safety from their own species.  

With a look of fabulous forbearance she stood by her significant other—husband, lover, boyfriend. Even in the face of utter hopelessness, the heartfelt songs of their selfless bond effected capacious conservation of her hopes. She had attended primary school for 3 years and could make out the meaning of sentences with the cute focus and innocent effort of a little girl. The meaning surfaced with a beacon of hope as she bore her attention into the smudged, greased headlines as if she was looking for a waterhole in the dry riverbed amidst a famine. Quicksilver pulsations of hope excited her to Goosebumps.  With ceremonial ease and melodious charm, the paper announced a big price for the winner of a marathon race soon to be organized. If only (I wish) I were a few years younger, she could smile looking at her old man. Immeasurable is the intensity of real love. There was a serene enlargement of her hopes egged on by the chance proffered by the greased piece of newspaper.

The scene was chaotic, sniping and discouraging like a melee among loutish touts. She was simple, Spartan and serene and looked like a wrinkled curator up against the most impossible of a task. People cackled with laughter, had their huge draughts of fun, and started advising her against the misadventure. Mired in puritanical presumptions they first laughed, took jibes and cracked jokes, then tried to dissuade her and finally attempted to almost push her out of the line saying it could cost her life. The humanity suffering from the metropolitan malnutrition of sentiments and emotions was too weak to provide her even penny farthing of support. To them the very idea of an old woman attempting the feat was wildly inappropriate. It appeared to belittle the halo of superiority hung over the amateur and professional heads. She was totally out of any category. To her all this was inconsequential. Her sole point of concern was the spectacle of her beloved’s body writhing in death-like clasp of mortality. The changeless silence in her soul was deaf to the hoots and hollers of the mocking crowed. The awkward quibbles arrowed and aimed at her went past and crashed in the dust around her work-worn, torn heels. Her’s was no puppy love driven only by the hormones and merely busy in humdrum obeisance to the strong forces of adolescence. It was wise, old, spirit-lifting and coaxing charmer. An undying, ever-spirited and well-cemented infatuation pushing her like a teenager’s overpowering burst of feelings for her husband.  And the old woman with a young spirit—bent upon beating the fate’s well-laid traps—ran the marathon, barefoot, her sari tucked with determination, her naked feet bleeding, and the air polluted with the mocking jeers of the heartless saboteurs who took it as a comic act worth their cheap entertainment. The belligerent myth of old age imbecility shouted its fierce espousal of the popular belief. The hooting was forcefully coherent as if pampered by some calamitous helmsmanship of chaos. The naysayers and the weaklings absorbed in hawkish critique through sarcasm, satire and mimicry. Thus roared the laughter experts, clowns, humorists and giggle choristers as if demonically praying to some dark god of gelatologists engaged in creating newer and newer versions of research in evil humor. Very few have the depths of soul to feel the mammoth struggles going inside a fellow human being.

Painted with radiant positiveness, she appeared archeologically picturesque as she stayed on course miles after miles with unsurpassed delicacy. The spectator’s mockery first changed to rankling suspicion, then to cheerful eagerness to graduate to bursts of appreciation, the ire now taking recourse towards the fitter, healthier, well-practiced and far younger runners. With a curious tranquility, and the lucrative mayhem drumming now against the fallen heroes, the woman won. Beyond the story of laurels, to her it was simply a matter of some money beyond the finish line so that she could help her soulmate in his fight against the disease. Enjoy the story of this courageous woman. A story of love basically! Bask in her glory!

Let’s pump a bit more warmth into the frozen bones and cold eyes that seem to have lost hope through a bit of talk on ‘soulmateship’. I know we have an overestimated view of our own validity and suitability to be an idealistic soulmate, provided we come across someone suitable for our pre-existing suitability to be a soulmate. It sounds a bit egoistic, isn’t it? In practical life, soulmateship is fabricated and carefully formulated with conscious effort. Soulmates are delicately worked upon relationships. These are copious creations by the artists of relationships worked upon with tools of love, care and share in humble anonymity with sublime and celestial touch. There is some multi-dimensional inspiration as the artists build the beautiful, splendidly enthroned mansion and install their heart’s deity there with openness, honesty and dreams bordering on reverence.

We presume that we are a package and wait for the destiny to make us meet our soulmates. This supposition is but a fleeting mirage. Well, guys it doesn't work that way. Soulmates are carefully set-up and nurtured by the dimly divine affections and myriad-petaled flowers of the heart. We never meet someone as soulmates. Don't expect to meet yours. Love, that initial attraction and biological heave—the tumultuous onset pulling with belligerent cajolery—is just the first step. After that it's a long way—circuiting along serpentine propensities—to a careful walk on the road to turn someone's soulmate. Beyond the categories of caste and class, soulmates like Lata and her husband are what substantiate all about life and living. With such little realizations, greatness is just one step and one breath away! Claim yours today itself!

Well, we can discuss a bit more about love which is supposed to be the bedrock of any relationship including that of soulmates. I just point out a bit of advice to all those into the business of soulmateship. Hate is not the opposite of love, indifference is! You may ask, ‘How?’ Well, I throw my feeble light on this. Take it if you find it digestible. 

See, love and hate are almost the shadow of each other, with just a thin line between them. They are in a kind of sputtering incantation side-by-side, the fractional connotations of each one fitting the rugged edges of the jigsaw puzzle. In fact, they may—and they do on a routine basis—interchange. One is the all elusive and ambiguous shadow of the other. They perilously expand and shrink sometimes in proportion and sometimes in disproportion, neither of them enjoying the unhindered domain. In fact, the two inseparable constituents the love-hate combo fuels each other. One is always having a protracted introspection of the other. A routine, petty corporatism fuels each other’s pursuit. So we can avoid judging one at the cost of the other.

Beware, ‘indifference’ with plenty of dismissive air around her is what kills the soul of a relationship. Its secret subculture eats the monument of seductiveness like termites eat wood.  When the person doesn't matter anymore to you, not even worth hate, that is when a relationship dies. So, indifference is the opposite of love, not hate because even with hate, there is still a possibility, indifference kills all prospects. Don’t allow the wicked propensities of indifference to creep into the resplendent era of the polluted puddles of love-hate combo. It’s the bête noire termite for the institution of soulmateship.

Beyond the Love-Hate chemistry, the sole purpose of being human is to consciously try to evolve spiritually. And your love, beginning from self and those who are your near and dear ones, is the ladder to take you there.

Coming to the more mundane paths of life busy with few halls delighted and the other despondent and many grey, rowdy, restless and brooding, silent shades in between, pitiably revolving in motiveless eddies, creating reticent retiring pools of losers as well as the adamant noise of egoistic, ecstatic casement of stony, victorious destinies. Even in the frozen lanes of winters, there were hot tempers and frayed attitudes. I am too common of an Indian to add to the noisy Chorus about NRC-CAA that had jolted India. In any case, the opposing notes from both ends turned it into a defeating blizzard. I was more concerned about my little issue. There was no electricity for the last 10 days in our village. To the hell with both the opposing armies on the NRC-CAA battlefield! All I wanted was the restoration of electricity, so that I could continue with my 12 books that I was reading simultaneously. My stock of candles was gone. Kerosene they no longer supply these days. The inverter supply shrieked before calling it quits. I just wanted electricity. I’m sure most of you also need the basic necessities of life.

All I could do was to pray: “Kindly leave the battlefield my bruised, bloodied and lacerated pro and anti NRC-CAA soldiers and come back home to find out if there is flour in the bin, light in your bulb, drinkable water in your pot, and sewage channel in your street! Come brave hearts come! You have participated in the historical battle, created enough history. Now return with pride and loads of prejudices. And see the littlest things that also need your benevolent look. Come home o my brave soldiers! All I need is this f***ing flicker in my dead bulb so that I can read my books at night!”

Some lessons to be learnt

 The last two years have been really tough for all of us. We have been challenged as a species by a little virus that has turned our world upside down. This is the journey of a common man during one of the most difficult phases in the modern history. All of us have suffered as the virus swept across continents. However, we have our individual tales of trials and tribulations that merge in the mammoth river of collective miseries.

Millennium after millennium we have fought against real animals in the forests and later against our imagined enemies larger than any animal on earth to make bigger and bigger weapons, wasting our precious resources in its wake. The chink in the armor is glaring now: Our unpreparedness to fight against the ‘small’. Corona teaches us a bitter lesson.

Is there any solution? Of course there is: Instead of pushing the stage of creation into a corner, from where it decides to launch a fusillade through nano-arrows, learn to balance things in all walks of life. Don’t push nature too far into a corner. It always has the option to hit back. It may not be able to hit tangibly in the form of a dinosaur, it can but surely do the same through invisible Corona and many more.

There is a reason why we have pushed mother earth too far into the corner. It’s our intra-Homo sapiens rivalry. Earlier we fought as the weak Homo sapiens who had to band together against physically far superior species. Now those threats are gone. So drop your weapons my dear ever-scared jungle man. We are almost biologically molded to keep fighting now after millions of years of fear and insecurity. Saving other remaining species from extinction is important, but far more important is to stop the virtual fear driven animosity among nations build upon false assumptions of ideologies, faiths and beliefs.

All that is needed is a collective feeling of Homo sapiens. When our ancestors set out from Africa 60,000 years ago, they could overpower far superior enemies in the battle of survival. Now we stand at the crossroads again. The enemy now is invisible. It will manifest through nano-particles and other imbalance-born outbursts of mother earth. Fight as a band. Fight as a species and as a globalist. Sow the seeds of love and trust among all nations.

All the divisions are man created. We can easily remove these. Love for our fellow human beings will sow the seeds of love for this little planet, our house. Don’t try to land on the Sun; try to use the precious resources where in the case of health emergencies our best cities in the world don’t bear the insult of the doctors and nurses fighting without even proper masks. A ballistic missile worth millions of dollars rusting in a bunker and a life savior doctor fighting Corona without the PPEs! See, what have we turned this world into! Isn’t it that we end up wearing our slippers on the head as a kind of the crown of fools?

The agricultural revolution allowed we humans to keep larger populations under worse conditions. Industrial revolution took it still further by allowing more and more people under still worse conditions. In the last couple of centuries we have further moved on. Presently, around 8 billion people are kept alive under worse conditions than ever in history. The tiny minority of economically well off people have utilities, but they have huge load of emotional suffering. This generation is the worst suffering in our entire history.

Why is it getting worse with each generation? Why is it that the current generation suffers more than the previous one? We are caught in a vicious circle. We have been committing the mistake of taking the things of utilities as the currency of life, living, happiness and joy. No, they aren't! We have to break this malafide linkage of the items of utility to happiness and joy in life. This grotesque monetization of the meaning of life in terms of the items of utility needs to done away with. The things which should have been under our feet, we have put them on our heads as crowns. No wonder, we are loaded to the limits and tottering on the path. Life and living is mere struggle.

Throw down the load of utilities from your mind. Walk over them. Use them. Treat them like your slaves, not vice versa. You know what, how funny it appears? It appears like we are carrying our slippers on our head, taking it to be a shiny crown. It's better we put on our slippers on our feet, a place where they need to be, not on our heads. The utilities off the head and you have a confident human going on her journey, the head occupied with better ideas and the heart full of sweet songs.

Corona stole many a smile from us. There were individual pains swaddled in collective miseries. But then we have to walk through the fog to reach the sunny slopes. And we did. Many of us fell on the way. It’s in remembrance of those who couldn’t make it. It’s also for those who went on to make it to the end of the tunnel. These chronicles are in celebration of life and living amidst all the testing and teasing pulls of fate and circumstances.

A ray of hope across the frigid fogs

 

The potted rose has surely given it all it had for Mother Nature. Its branches droop with the flowery bunch-loads of roses. Fullest expansion is painless dissolution. Fullest being is non-being itself. A life harnessed to the full is griefless death. Isn't a tree just mother earth expanding and this air merely further expansion of the tree? Live and blossom so fully that you explode with ecstasy instead of burning to painful oblivion. And what are the fuels of this painful burning? These are the things that hold us back, preventing our fullest expansion. Fear is the primary roadblock. It breeds many other offshoots like anger, hate, jealousy, greed, judgements. Smile, laugh and explode with ecstasy like she does!

**

It's a beautiful symmetry of spider web among the guava leaves. In the foggy morning it looks a beatific beady design with the dew-strings drawn to perfection. Homosapiens please don't be too proud of what you create. The littlest of players in the existential game create far more complex designs in their individual capacity. Most of our creations are an offshoot of mankind's joint imagination and effort. What a spider does is equivalent to one man making Eiffel tower. An ant carrying a huge dead carpenter ant is equal to a man carrying an elephant on his head. So please let out the extra air of pride in the stomach. All this drama around is primarily self-manifesting.  It's a series of self emerging designs and patterns. We just hop around for some time as a tiny part of some design in some corner.

**

It's a little story of 6 inches and 7 months in a corner of the existential game. It’s a little Sadabahar flower that set out to etch its destiny in a little crack in a plastered wall about 6 feet from the ground. She was born in the killing heat of June in a little crack in the wall. Well, one can't choose where one lands at birth, so no point in complaining. In the killer heat she kept her little self alive, waiting for the rains. There is no point in comparing. There are plants of her species who have entire earth to themselves and grow in feet. She but managed the best with her little crack. The rains came. She blossomed to get her sole flower as the trophy of her passion for life. Now the hard winters are buffeting the surroundings. There she stands tall in her smallness, waiting patiently for one fine spring morning when the sunrays will have enough warmth for another smile. Her few inches carrying worth of many feet in normal circumstances. Her sole flower carrying the gist of fragrance and smile worth hundreds of flowers. Well, that's the hallmark of a meaningful life: Do the best with whatever you have received to begin with.

**

You feel lonely on your path and a stranger comes your way. You both walk and smile and become familiar. And at some turn both of you drift apart. Who won't like to go smiling all the way till the end? But still people drift apart because destination is rarely the same. Pain is natural. Memories also cast long shadows from behind. All one can do is to commit oneself to come as a better, more evolved person if at some turn on the path, faraway in future, you come to walk by the side of that same person. This is what I would say doing justice to one's past without wasting present and losing a sight of the future.

**

As Dickens says in at some place in Oliver Twist, ‘It's a world of disappointment: often to the hopes we most cherish, and hopes that do our nature the greatest honour.’

But then the maestro gives us our hope back also by saying, ‘This world may be a sad and sorry place, but it's not a hopeless place for it's a place where truth must be learned and souls must be made.’

**

If you want to help yourself against blatant lies, stop asking questions to our politicians. Political answers would come out as lies and falsehoods. Almost naturally. So to avoid the mountains of lies adding to its height, avoid asking questions to the politicians.

**

Nobody leaves anyone. We are all simply running away from our own deep personal pains. Never forget, usually when two people meet they are coming together to beat their loneliness and forget their pain. But the intrinsic restlessness stays and people again try to move away from it. The ego construct will always blame the other. These are but our own scars. We can't be a giver in any relationship until we are at peace within. Till then it's a psychological drama of hurt, pain and blame game among unhappy people bumping into each other as tankers. Sorry takers. Hardly any difference between a tankers and takers by the way. I remember myself as a tanker, firing out the vollies of my frustrations, believing others to be the cause of the outpouring, while all along this, the ammunition lay within. And once you realise this, the live-fire ammunition turns damp. It loses its fiery heat. Only our ego keeps it live. Then the minor irritants, which serve as tiny triggering sparks at the most, fall on a dead heap that's not inflammable. No burning within and you get sips of succour, self driven solace and restfulness.

**

Most of us terribly under-do most of the things in life that should actually be done and over-do the things that should have avoided. Plain cowardice. Full of imaginary fears. Fear is the soul of a cowardly, curtailed life. As Dickens says, 'I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.'

**

How would you expect it to be a peaceful world when there are billions with limited means and unlimited infirmities of mind?

**

There are far more nice people in the world than you ever imagined. Badness is overhyped. All we need is to keep our hearts open and beautiful people walk into your life like warm sunshine after weeks of snowy blizzard. Keep your hope alive for there comes a beautiful soul just round the next corner. Keep smiling and keep going. Accept the past. Crying over it only spoils the present and breeds bitterness. Crying over it only spoils the present and breeds bitterness. Double said, intentionally. If the present isn't sweet it only means u carry too much bitterness from the past. Forgetting isn't easy till we forgive. And forgiveness isn't feasible till one is caught in your fault Vs my fault. Don't dissect the past. That's like taking  nice dreams and horrible nightmares to be more substantial than the reality. It consumes too much energy. This is cadaverous addiction, a nasty post-mortem of things that hardly matter now. Past also is overhyped in terms of giving us lessons. The present is the workshop to learn and unlearn and all else. Here and now. Here and now. Here and now. One's ability to be here and now gives the weapon to cut unnecessary karmic entanglement. Present moment awareness is the knife that cuts the nasty mooring that keeps us stuck up in stinking muds, keeping us away from the bubbly stream of life. Awareness of here and now is your weapon to slay these phantoms of the mind.

**

We come across wrong people only because we have to walk further on to meet the right people who will share a part of their journey with us. Then further on, these right people also appear wrong. So whatever was right was just in its present form. Ultimately, we realise that the final frontier is to be crossed by us all alone. Never expect companionship to see you home in any relationship. These are mere occurrences like trees and flowers falling on your soul's eternal path. Give them respect, give them attention, give them time and energy, for they also do the same. But don't expect them to be the vehicle of your journey. They are just fellow travellers like you and me. Why be so utilitarian to view travellers as the means of taking you to the destination where you feel you will find it joyful. They can be beautiful milestones in your journey at the most.

**

Usually, our vilification and villanisation of someone is merely a desperate attempt to not to see the ugliness in our own persona. I think if we give just one-tenth of the critical attention that we give to others to our own selves, we will have immense opportunity to smile unconditionally as we walk on our path.

A story of two roses

Picture 1: It opens up fully. It gives all it has to open up and scatter its still fragrant petals as a homage to gentle winds, balmy afternoon winters and keenly awaiting mother earth. It showers beauty. It's a drizzle of joy. It's not death. This is ecstatic disintegration for the larger integration. A process! A fluidity beyond the constraints of space and time.

Picture 2: It clings and stinks. It doesn't want to give. It dies a painful elongated death. It doesn't surrender to change and holds its youth's bloom in a fist, a constriction, a knot, a stagnation. It will be there till it turns ugly. The glory of its past will be overshadowed by the piteous whine of its present. A painful event stuck up in the loop of time.