Aatmasphere

Ok, so I started another blog -

Aatmasphere


~~~

Life and death

a moth crosses paths

with a roving blackbird

life and death

A  few thoughts I wanted to add to this haiku I posted yesterday.

Sometime ago, I was in the beans patch and something, quick as a flashing sword, flew past me, dived into the bean bushes and flew out. Much to my surprise, it was a blackbird with a struggling moth in its beak. It perched itself in the fence and proceeded to flick its head vigorously from side to side, perhaps in an attempt to hasten the moth’s demise. I don’t exactly know why it did this, but it seemed, to my human reasoning, that if it opened its beak to gulp it down, the moth, sensing release, would fly away. Then, when the moth stopped fluttering, it vanished down the bird’s throat in a series of gulps.

I must admit to being disturbed by this drama of the moth’s death. To gardeners, moths are important pollinators and are considered beneficial. But that is human reasoning, flawed as always. After I wrote the haiku, I looked at the scenario a bit more detachedly.

The moth died, but in death, did it not give life to the bird? Because of its death, the bird continues to live. So, life itself hasn’t ceased, it has just been transferred from one form to another. The cycle of life didn’t break, it just kept going, the moth living on as the bird. It is because of our human attachment to form and its apparent separateness that death causes us so much grief.

The other human fallacy that I harboured was the classification of ‘living’ and ‘non-living’ things. Science’s definition of ‘life’ is the ability to ingest, digest (as in food) and reproduce. By this definition things like water and sunlight are ‘non-living’ things. But without them, all life would cease to exist. We take in water (as part of out ingestion and digestion) and a hefty percentage of us comprises water, and while it is in us, it is considered ‘living’ but as soon as it exits our systems, it goes back to ‘non-living’. A bit unfair, from water’s point of view :) Not that it cares...:(

You wouldn’t consider a piece of iron ‘living’ yet small traces of iron is utterly essential to human life. The sand on the beach looks ‘non-living’, yet silicon in the human body contributes to health. So, could science’s definition of ‘life’ be called accurate? Or, is such a classification even necessary?

Life goes on seamlessly, with forms disappearing into one another, elements getting in and out of systems. From this point of view, the illusion of separation tends to get hazy. What emerges is the view that the whole universe (living and non-living, seen and unseen) is a vast, seamless, unending ocean of intelligence, in which waves arise, dimly seen as forms, they ride the crest and dissolve back into the ocean. A moth wave rises and melds into a bird wave. Human waves arise and dissolve. The whole is alive and is Life itself. In this scheme of things, there is no death. There is only Life and it is infinite.

And yes, we are that intelligence, not separate, but One. Briefly self-aware, as we ride the human wave.

~~~

Insight of the day

It matters little what others think
it matters not at all what you think,

the real you is not thinking
the real you is just being.

Consider this ...

Slow cooker

Many years ago, when I was haunted by the pain of childlessness, I had gone to visit a psychic with one burning question, ‘Will I ever be a mother?” And she had said, “No, in this life you have chosen a different path, you have decided that it will be about yourself, about finding who you are, and evolving to your highest potential”. It had sounded grand at that time and even lofty but I had still wanted a child and had come away disappointed.

Now, all these years later, with the pain gone and having eased into the situation, I can look back and see that she was right. I can see that not only about that situation but all the situations, circumstances, events, people who have entered my life and left or stayed behind, were all pushing, forcing, cajoling me to turn away from the world and look within to find answers to all my quests. To put away acquired knowledge and rely on my own inner knowing, that timeless wisdom we are all born with.

I doubt if this would have happened if I was busy raising a family with nary a moment to spare to spend in contemplation. All the dark nights of the soul that ended in clarity on glorious mornings, all the veering into despair that made me push away from darkness into the light, all the hours spent in raging questioning, in quiet introspection, in the letting go of resistance to circumstances have slowly allowed clarity to emerge from the murky depths of confusion.

I can now see that each experience, no matter how unpleasant it had seemed at that time, had contributed, like a piece of a puzzle, to making my life whole. To helping me evolve. To making me go towards my inner self. I can now see that life is a slow cooker, ingredients are getting added to the broth all the time as and when needed, some bitter, some tangy, some sweet but all necessary and nutritious and are all going towards the making of a whole and tasty me :)

Conversations

Oftentimes it has so happens that a conversation with someone or some people leaves me drained and exhausted. I have wondered why that is the case and some deeper reflection has revealed the following. Conversations (even with yourself) are like meals. They are meant to nourish and sustain you, and promote growth. What your eat the tongue should find savoury, that is the first milestone. But more importantly, it should enter your stomach, be easily digested and absorbed and turn into muscle, bone and blood.

Some conversations on the surface look like fun - chirpy, frothy, gossipy. They are like junk food, good to see, smell divine, even the taste-buds go into salivary overdrive, but they full of empty calories with very little goodness. They enter the system and lie heavy on the digestion and possibly lead to ill-health. As much as I can, I try to avoid these junk-food, small-talk conversations, that make me feel later that I have lost a part of myself.

I wait for those rare, scintillating, exquisite ones, in which the words flow with ease, in a space of mutual trust and understanding. Where neither party is trying to show off their knowledge, or prove the other wrong, or just wants to skim the surface with words. Where listening is practised as an art and not extended as a favour. Where one listens with one’s whole being, not with just the ears or the brain. Where personalities are set aside, and the illusion of separateness dims and there is not only the meeting of minds but also of the essences. No one mentions, or maybe even notices it, but love sits there quietly holding everyone’s hand. And long after the conversation is over, its light lingers and transforms us ever so subtly, and we find that we have grown and taken a step towards our Higher Self.

My adventures with fire

A couple of incidents set me on a train of thought.

One : I was taking something out of the over the other night, and in a definitely ‘duh’ moment had not put on my oven gloves. Focussed on the cooking item I did not realise till too late that my hand had made contact with the red hot oven coil. There was a sizzle and a bit of smoke as I pulled by hand out and a very strange smell hit my nostrils. It took me a moment to realise it was the smell of burning skin as it was the very first time my brain had encountered this smell. I stood there for a few moments, transfixed, processing this new bit of information, ‘this is how burnt human flesh smells like’ before dunking my hand into cold water.

Two : Today is a windy day. The wind has been blowing like a demented animal, curling around the house trying to blow it down and the house has been creaking in complaint. It got so cold that I decided to light the fire. The operative word here is ‘I’ because the official fire lighter has always been my husband. So I thought, ‘how hard can it be?’ After all humans have been lighting fires since, well, fire was discovered and that was a long, long time ago. Fire-lighting skills should be in my genes by now. Little did I know that my fire-lighting skill gene had been mutated by the convenience of modern living.

I had the vague notion that a fire of sorts should be started using paper and kindling before the logs are introduced so that is what I set about doing. I know your are not going to believe this but let me tell you that setting fire to paper is easy but keeping it alight is close to impossible and it is even harder with kindling. The fire kept dying out and I kept adding more paper and more kindling and there was a time, I must confess, when I was tempted to ask Uncle Google. Such abomination! I’m sure my Stone Age ancestress would have turned in her fossil and gone up in smoke in shame. Finally, half and hour and reams of newspaper later, I managed to put the logs in and get the fire going. After which I sat back and toasted myself :)

Gazing into the fire brought back the memory of the smell of burnt flesh and I began to wonder. How is it that when it took me, admittedly a novice, half an hour to start a fire with dry combustible materials, do people, also novices, burn live human beings in a jiffy? True, a bride being burnt for dowry usually has kerosene poured over her and that speeds it up. Also true, that in a riot when people try to kill humans that belong to the other caste / religion / tribe, they use petrol and the clothes that people wear are combustible. Which then brought me to the deeper question, to what extent does greed or hatred eat away at a human being that he/she can set fire to another human being and bear the acrid smell of burning flesh, and watch that person writhing in agony. The shock of the smell of the slight singeing of my hand still reverberates painfully in my head, how can anyone bear to watch another human being be burnt alive?

A recent Delanceyplace article I read titled ‘soldiers are reluctant to kill’, says “It is the simple and demonstrable fact that there is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.” It goes on to give evidence that “The weak link between the killing potential and the killing capability of units was the soldier. The simple fact is that when faced with a living, breathing opponent instead of a target, a significant majority of the soldiers revert to a posturing mode in which they fire over their enemy's heads."

If such is the case, then how do some people overcome that resistance to kill, especially if the other has done them no harm and their lives are not being threatened in any way? How and why are we able to overcome our innate goodness, bypass the ‘survival of the species’ instincts that Nature has hard-wired into us and turn ourselves into killing monsters? What is it that pushes us over the edge into murderous madness? Is there, like Freud suggested, a basement in our psyches where we tend to keep our socially-disapproved emotions suppressed but which occasionally thunder up through the trapdoor and overcome us?

No answers, just questions. And the final one - am I capable of this act of killing? What would it take me to tip over the edge? Would I be able to stop it?

The power of presence

When you have all the time in the world and no fixed agenda then the tendency is to while away the time. But then I realise that this thought is coming from a pre-conceived notion that time should be well spent. And I also can see that the satisfaction that comes from doing something also arises in the mind. It is the mind that says, ‘I must do something’, ‘this or that is the right thing to do’ and it is the mind that says ‘well done’ or ‘you have wasted your time’. When the mind is still, I find that the urgency to do anything does not arise, there is no desire for movement, no desire to fill the moment with accomplishment. Things arise naturally and get done naturally. Because there is no agenda, there is no disappointment. There is no feeling of achievement either because I had not set out to do anything. There is however a feeling of fullness. Whether anything is done or not, whether anything is accomplished or not. I realise, the fullness comes from being present, present in the moment. Because presence fills you up. You are already full of it. You become aware of  your own fullness. Which is quite different from the flush of achievement that the mind conjures up, which lasts for a while and then disappears. Which then prompts the mind to find another goal, another milestone to cross, so that it may revel in its own importance.

The sun plays hide and seek from behind the clouds. A bird calls out. Its call, crystal clear and sonorous falls on my ears. For a brief moment we connect. But then, are we really separate? The collection of atoms that I call my body and which I perceive to be different and separate from the collection of atoms that is the bird gives the impression of separateness. But this perception is being projected by the mind. When the mind is still we do not perceive ourselves to be a collection of atoms with sense faculties. There is a presence which has no physical boundaries and may yet be one with the bird, with all of everything. To think of ourselves as just a physical entity with sense faculties and a mind-created self-image, concepts and belief structures seems very limiting. And a travesty. So then what is the truth about ourselves? The mind cannot conceive it, nor grasp it, let alone explain it. It can only be reached in stillness, when the mind is put away. Then silence yields the truth.

Whose story is it anyway?

Writing stories which used to come so facilely to me at one time, seems to be an arduous task these days. I’ve thought long and hard about it and wondered why. I now realise that writing a story is not as simple as just imagining up characters and a plot-line. You have to imagine yourself as the characters. Inhabit their bodies, minds and hearts. Experience that and write about that.

Sometimes, or often times, the ‘I’ that has inhabited me does not permit the eviction of itself from me to inhabit another personality. That is when my stories get stuck. When I try to write as a spectator, looking in from outside and trying to guess what they are thinking and feeling, it doesn’t work. It comes out contrived, like a fabrication, like a paper flower, colourful, yet false and lacking reality. So I wait for the time when I am allowed to switch, inhabit my characters again and write their lives.

But then the question arises. If I can inhabit a different world and experience a different life, all in my imagination, then could the life I am currently experiencing be an imagined one too? Is there some seer, some watcher who conjures up this life like a dream, a dream from which I can awaken and find myself in a different reality? Is that what is called self-realisation? To awaken from the dream of this illusionary world and know reality.

We already know that people whose brains are wired differently from us so called ‘normal’ people, experience a different reality. So then, which is the actual reality if reality is subjective and differs from person to person? Shouldn’t we be wanting to find out, instead of being content to be stuck in a world of shifting illusions, living out our lives in a dream-state?  

The four-leaf fritter

I must confess that in the past when I have come across a blog that shared recipes I have felt slightly let-down. I mean, a blog is about serious writing, not recipes. Even though I do trawl the net looking for new and interesting ways to cook, recipes are meant to be on food sites, not blogs. So now, when I’m about to share a story and a recipe, I smile a bit sheepishly and self-indulgently :) But then, I tell myself, when a recipe forms itself out of inspiration and available ingredients in your kitchen and turns out to be a success, it begs to be shared.

I’ve been growing fenugreek in my kitchen garden these past few weeks and today I pulled out the last of the crop. Instead of making the usual rotis or sabzi with it, I thought, let me, for a change, make fritters with it. Then, just for variety I decided to add mint leaves and the leaves of the Coleus aromaticus (panikoorka in Malayalam) from the kitchen garden. When I dug into the refrigerator to retrieve the coriander leaves, I saw some corn ears taking up a lot of space in the veggie tray and took one out, de-kerneled it and added the kernels to the chopped up leaves. Then some besan went in, together with cumin seeds, turmeric, chilli powder and salt. Generous squeezes of a lemon went in next, all combined together with water. The mixture turned out to not have a pouring consistency and feeling reluctant to add more besan, I decided to stick to ‘healthy’ and add wholewheat flour instead. When that had gone in, I remembered sesame seeds. I love sesame seeds so much that given the chance, I’d give in to the temptation of adding it to EVERYTHING. Which is not such a bad thing compared to hubby’s penchant for adding fenugreek seeds to everything. So, in went a bold dash of sesame seeds. I then spotted a half-peeled potato sitting on the bench-top and chopped that up and put that in too. The batter was now a thick yellow-green mass with the greens kind of lumping together in solidarity.

Now, in keeping with my ‘eat healthy’ philosophy I had planned to pan-fry the fritters with as little oil as possible, but looking at the thick mass bursting with leaves, I realised that pan-frying is only going to cook the underside and the leaves and insides might remain uncooked, so I poured some more oil into the flat bottomed pan so as to have an oil depth of a few millimetres. I then poured tablespoonfuls of batter into the hot oil and flattened each fritter out so that about half of it was submerged in the oil. Fried them on both sides to a light brown crispiness and drained them on kitchen paper, which to my dismay got quite drenched with oil. However, the end result was quite crunchy and tasty.

Well, after I had eaten a couple of these oil-laden delicacies my conscience literally started to jump up and down in anger telling me off and telling me to go work off all the fat I had ingested. So, off I went on a walk and as usual when I go walking in the quiet dusk in the balmy weather, I tend to muse and ponder over things. I got to thinking how like life it was, the fritters that I had made. A lot of times we don’t have a say in the hand we get dealt in life. We have to make do with what we’ve got and fashion a life out of it. We might have to take large amounts of wholesome flour and somehow stir in the bitterness of fenugreek, the hot anger of chilli, the coolness of mint and the fragrant virtue of coriander. Add great dashes of lemon for zest and sesame for the nutty flavour, salt for steadfastness, all to be combined and fried in the trials and tribulations of life. But just to the right degree, not overdone to result in burn-out or frustration, or underdone with a soft belly and laziness.

All great recipes are born this way, I like to think. In times of famine or plenty, people have taken what was available and combined and cooked them in ways that would result in food that was not only tasty but was nourishing to the body and soul as well. I guess that’s what our lives are about too. To take the things that are available and at hand and fashion a life that is a thing of beauty and nourishment and wholesomeness.

Spectacles of nature

I stepped outside today evening to try and spot the unfolding of a heavenly spectacle in the skies, the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus. It took me several minutes of scanning the tree-obscured horizon to  finally spot the two planets in a gap between the trees, sparkling bright in the azure sky. The brighter of the two might have been Venus and Jupiter even though bigger in size looked like a younger sibling hanging around the brighter one. They are orbiting on vastly different trajectories, but once in a while their travels align them in such a way that when looked at from the earth, they appear to be in conjunction.

Later on, when the night had deepened, I stepped outside once again to gaze up at the night sky. The sky was almost clear, with only a few clouds obscuring the view, and stars lit up the heavens. The Milky Way was a diaphanous swathe across the sky and looking at this starry display, once again I was moved by awe, thinking of our tiny little planet amidst the heavens and the universe spreading out into infinity. And a tiny little me, sitting on a tiny little planet watching it. Its sheer grandeur is so monumental and yet to think that the force that shaped the stars and the galaxies also shaped me and throbs within me. This puts us straightaway into the league of stars, and we can feel the pulse of creation, of awesomeness throbbing within us.

Earlier on, I had gone for a walk and sat down by the river. The sun had gone down and the sunset was lighting up the sky in golden hues. Down there where I sat there was no sign of human habitation. It was as though I had escaped into a different world. The river flowed with music on her lips and jauntiness in her step. Sea gulls feed on the pebbled banks and once in a while took off in flight, spread their wings and alighted again. The bank opposite was thick with bush of various kinds and hues, and shadows gathered among the leaves, and slithered on the branches, whispering secrets. As the day retreated, the night approached, like a soft-footed lover, all velvet smoothness and dark mystery.

Sitting there, cradled in nature and caressed by the velvet night, my mind grew calm and still. I began to feel a blurring of my separateness as the walls that I normally put up while negotiating the eddying currents of human transactions began to dissolve and fall away. The sense of a separate 'me' began to disappear and the sense of a far greater vastness began to reveal itself. There was only an observer and the feeling that all was in oneness and all was in bliss.

When the mind falls silent, truth and beauty reveal themselves. What does the mind do other than record events, store and retrieve data, and based on past recorded data, form opinions, concepts, beliefs etc. But the moment is newborn and fresh and its beauty and aliveness cannot be sensed by a mere cataloguer of a database, it must be sensed by something beyond the mind, something that dwells and moves within us and whose ethereal voice is normally drowned out by the cacophony of the mind. In moments like these, when we are in the midst of nature, when we get the chance to drop the mind and move into stillness, the soft, loving voice reveals to us, not in words, but in a deeply felt sense, the truth about ourselves. Then, we can be said to have come home.

~~~

Imagination

“I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.”

~ Duane Michals

Random ramblings 3

Today is 21.2.12. I’m beginning to wonder why I tend to ramble on days when the arrangement of dates is rather interesting.

I also came across an interesting concept today.  I am participating in Jean Houston’s ‘Awakening to one’s true purpose’ course and today she introduced to us the concept of the ‘mensch’. Mensch according to Wikipedia means “a person of integrity and honour”. But the way Jean explained it, a mensch is a person, real or imaginary who embodies all the qualities that you admire and wish to have as your own qualities. So first you conceptualise an imaginary mensch or look at a real-life one, and then visualise yourself as being that person with all the qualities that you find admirable.

A few days back I was listening to a talk by Deepak Chopra in which he recounted how while he was a child his mother had told him that he was an embodiment of Lord Krishna. In his words, “luckily for me, I believed her”. He had not been told that he was Lord Krishna himself but that the most admirable qualities of Lord Krishna were nascent within him. His undoubting belief in this allowed these dormant qualities to express themselves, in time.

Believing in the mensch and that you can become it, works on the same principle. Any quality, any attribute, any virtue can be developed this way. By believing that they lie dormant within you and by your intentional calling forth they express themselves and flower. It is as simple as that.

~~~

Random ramblings 2

Today is 12.2.12. Nothing special, just a nice arrangement of digits. 

It was 11 days ago that I had announced that I would write a little something about how things are going in my life and all I could come up was 11 days of silence. Yes, I know I shouldn’t say things that I cannot bring to practice but it wasn’t for want of trying. The blank page would look back at me and  talking about my little triumphs and disasters didn’t appeal to me much, and I would abandon my efforts. The events of life, they seem to come and pass quickly, talking about them would involve reliving the experience. And what would be the advantage of that? What has been experienced is gone. this moment holds a new experience. Right now, the experience of writing, the experience of exploring something new, following a new train of thought, going down a new path - all these are in the now, why talk about all the things gone by?

Anyway, before I ramble any more, let me say that right now I’m feeling very directionless, so very listless. I don’t know why. Must be drowsiness from last night late sleeping. On this lazy, languorous afternoon I feel like having a long conversation with someone intimate punctuated by long cozy silences. Just getting lost in the experience of losing myself, of losing my boundaries and floating, flying, scattering and doing it with someone who feels the same and who can share the experience of abandon. Of letting go. Of losing all bonds, even of the body and rising up like air and scattering and dissolving into nothingness.

Somehow, the experience of being alive in a body, with a mind and thoughts and things to do and places to go and outcomes to achieve and all the strings of the act of living seems like a burden. My soul wishes to be free, to leave this body, this world which is holding it back and be free. To melt back into nothingness and everythingness, to be nothing and everything, to be nowhere and everywhere. Yes, the burden of the body seems to be heavy, unbearably heavy. Choosing to experience worldly life seems to be a mistake. To willingly give up all that freedom and to be bound in a limited worldview, bound by time and space in a body that can move only so much feels like being in a prison.

Now it makes sense, the angst, the restlessness I felt all day. Maybe I don’t want to be here but rather be in the hereafter. Maybe my soul hears voices calling and is longing to join them. Maybe that’s why I was thinking about writing my will this morning. Not that it matters who gets my possessions, but just to make it easier for people left behind. Just yesterday I was thinking of a relative’s death and how lucky she was to be freed of her body-mind and to return to her natural state. Maybe that’s what has triggered my soul’s remembrance and its longing to be free. Or maybe it’s the afternoon’s languor, the deep, drowsy silence accentuated by the soft, low buzz of bees. The mind is lulled into half-sleep and in the awareness that opens up, the soul remembers its origins and longs to break free of its worldly chains and return to light and freedom.

But I guess some deeper, unknown reason keeps me here, in this body and mind. In this cauldron of experience, bubbling with desires and thoughts and feelings and pleasure and pain. Maybe now that I’ve glimpsed the vastness of the eternal, I can sit on the rim of the cauldron and watch the bubbling knowing that they are all just bubbles, some lasting longer than the others but all going to burst anyway. Someday, when I know it’s the right moment, I can step away from the cauldron and walk away. Until then, I must continue to be in the cauldron, tasting its juices, but aware that the bubbles are just that and nothing more.

Interesting, how restlessness on languorous summer afternoons can reveal things. I guess, all states of mind are leading us to some new insight, some discovery of truth, if we let them me and be still enough to allow the lesson to reveal itself.

The restlessness is gone, in its place is a peaceful detachment and stillness.

F.U.C.G.

(Warning : Please read further only if you have a sense of humour and a high tolerance to irreverence. :P)

In the long distant past (possibly when the Ages were Dark and dismal to boot) in the empire where the sun allegedly never set (but has, luckily for its colonies, since set) it is rumoured that a consent had to be procured from the monarch in order to pursue the activity of making babies. Once said consent had been obtained, a sign had to then be put up on the front door proclaiming ‘F0rnication Under the Consent of the King’ (F.U.C.K.). It is hard to tell why this extreme amount of control by the state was imposed. Maybe the king was a control freak and got his kicks by looking at the ledgers and saying ‘Oh! 350 people want to f0rnicate, let me give consent to 50 and let the others stew in their juices. Ha Ha Ha!’ And then giving himself the royal consent, off he would go to tickle his fourth queen. Or maybe, it was a means to control the population, just in case they multiplied too much and thought about revolting against the revolting conditions they lived in, in which case, a revolting peasant would find the royal neck and give it a not-so-royal slit and the kick-desiring royal would be forced to kick the bucket. Quite smart they were, eh, the ‘mai-baap’ of yore.

Well, actually that got me thinking … what if such a policy could be put to work in India as an anti-proliferation measure. That train of thought got me quite excited, I mean, in the mental sense. And I started to think of its consequences. For starters, even if such a policy was formulated, since we have managed to kick out all our raja-log, both desi and videsi, and now have a apunich chunela sarkar firmly entrenched, it would have to be called ‘F0rnication Under the Consent of the Government’ or F.U.C.G. Ughhh! I must say, just introducing the word ‘government’ just made the hitherto highly pleasure-inciting activity suddenly lose all its desirability and become almost as dull and unexciting as a bureaucratic babu. Imagine you and your significant other lying in bed and saying, ‘let’s get this thingamajig from the government.’ ‘Hmmmm…?’ ‘Ummm, let’s get the latest plasma installed in the bedroom instead’. See, that would straight away put off a lot of people from even thinking of trying to make babies. Part of our pesky proliferation problem solved there itself.

Well, let’s say some people refuse to get sidetracked by trashy TV shows even if they are in HD and 3D and are still wanting to steam up a sweat between the sheets. The next step, then would be to register all the applications from these testosterone-junkies. Out of the total of 1.2 billion (and rising) people, let’s say, there are 20 million eagerly waiting couples, and as luck would have it, you are one of those in whose chart Shani was casting a malevolent eye at the house of kiddos, then your application would be lost in the corridors of babudom for the next 30 years by which time your baby-making hormones would have gone into retirement, packed its bags and left, last heard of holidaying in Hawaii, leaving you, shall we say, cold in the extremities and, errr, hot in the middle. Hmmm … halat kharab, upar se kismet bhi kharaab, magar kya karen, such is life, just belt up and bear it, man. And look at the bright side, you complaining fella. So what if you couldn’t save your lineage from dying out, you have just saved the world from the population bomb. Come here and line up for the Bharat Ratna behind all these other nice senior citizens. And wipe that grimace off your face and smile for the camera please …

But what about all those people who after making trips to various holy places, fasting on Saturdays and feasting the holy men, manage to chum up with Shani and get him to move their applications to the front of the line, you ask? Well, you really are having an anxiety-attack, aren’t you? Let me assure you that you can safely put your worries together with all the other ill-fated applications down there in the dungeons, for the Indian babu will always remain a fly-swatting, file-pushing, long lunch-taking, personal errand-running flag-bearer of absentee incompetence. And no amount of Shani-appeasement is going to change that. But what is beginning to worry me is the thought that they might be able to side-step the babu-road-block if they took the help of the lissome Laxmi and shared some of their bootlegged bounty with the babu. Some of the missus’ ill-gotten diamonds packed into a mithai dabba and pressed upon the drooling babu or a creaking peti full of crinkly crores left at the bureaucratic door and the babu might give them the consent even before you finish saying ‘take off your clothes’.

In which case Darwin will rise from the ashes and kick up a big ruckus because we will have changed his theory to ‘survival of the filthiest richest’ and Amnesty International are not going to be too tickled either with the ensuing demographic disaster of proliferating smugglers, extortionists and liquor kings. But Darwin does not need a F.U.C.G. and neither does AI. In their lands it is consent-free, or rather, it’s a free-for-all, so they should count themselves lucky and go and proliferate in their own countries and not try to be the ‘foreign hand’ who is always trying to halt India’s progress. These firangs, I tell you, always interfering.

I know, I know, it’s not fair to the aam janta, who cannot afford to part with mildewed millions. The milling middle class, who is forever trying to add zeros to their paltry savings, trying hard from being hazarpatis, to become lakhpatis to crorepatis. When have they ever allowed boiled and pasty babus get in the way of accomplishing their ends, let me ask? To them what are babus anyway? Mere law-makers! Cogs in the wheel of the great lumbering, slumbering bureaucracy. Who is going to enforce the law? Not these stuffed shirts, with their starched collars and starchier smiles. Bah! The MCs are street smart. Whenever the hormones hit them below the belt, all they will do is pass a few Gandhijis to the hawaldars, the low on salary but high on self-importance law-enforcers and all will be happy. The babu, happy that he is not disturbed in reducing the number of flies in the over-populated fly kingdom, the hawaldar who can now go and buy that silk sari to keep his wife happy in anticipation of you-know-what, and the MC who can now indulge in the most pleasurable exercise ever known. Such a wonderful invention it is - this happiness-circulation device called corruption. I wonder why Anna Hazare was making such a big fuss over it, even trying to kick the bucket in protest, maybe his hormones were on vacation. Or did a Wall Street on him, you know, took a high-dive into nothingness.

But I hate to think of all that matrimonial ads that will surface. Like - ‘Boy: 10th fail, but with F.U.C.G. degree. Of no known employment other than putting degree to good, far and wide use. Seeks beautiful, fair pativrata girl with light eyes, expert in cooking and house management, willing to bring in at least 100 tolas of gold and 10 crores in cash ’. Or ‘Girl : 5th fail, getting close to 40, has rudimentary cooking skills, and most importantly F.U.C.G. Please reply only if you are a doctor, Air Force pilot or CEO or earning a seven figure salary and willing to employ a cook and housemaid. All other applications will be rejected.’ This is not looking too good, is it? And the fellow who was quite happy printing fake 1000 rupee notes will now be able to move from lakhpati to crorepati in a jiffy just by changing the typeface on his printing machine. This is looking downright depressing.

Ok, ok, ok, I know when I’m beaten. I know this idea of mine has as much chance of surviving as a rain-drop in the Saharan desert doing the belly-dance and surviving. So, I guess I’ll have to give it a fair and fitting funeral right here. But I do and most unabashedly hope that it does NOT RIP. I hope its seething, unfulfilled ghost rises to haunt the Indian psyche until they buy enough ‘What an IDEA Sirji’s and indulge in their orgasmic adventures only in virtual 3D. In which case Abhishek Bachan will get all the credit for having stopped India’s monumental baby production activities.

What the @#$%^, a woman’s brain is grossly under-rated, I tell you ...

~~~

Relationships

I’ve been pondering over a talk by Sadguru in which he says that we depend too much on relationships to make us happy.

After thinking about it for some days, I think I’ve got to the wisdom of that. Best to be independent of all outside attachments. Love is so subtle, it can be expressed in spirit, from soul to soul, why seek physical connection? It’s the mind that seeks entanglement of the physical kind. Relationships. How we seek fulfillment in these. I’m glad that God sent me a few unfulfilling ones, some disappointing ones. It made me stop and look at myself closely, at what I was seeking, what I was giving. At where all the fulfillment and disappointment were being enacted. How desires were arising and clamouring to be met. How the fulfillment of each desire even though bringing a brief moment of pleasure, brought a more lasting void and how the mind seeks to fill that void by fabricating another desire. And so, the endless cycle continues. If all my desires were getting fulfilled, I guess, I would not have stopped to consider this. But some of them were not fulfilled and that forced me to look for answers. ‘Pleasure puts you to sleep and pain wakes you up. If you do not want to experience pain, do not go to sleep.’ Nisargadutta said it so well and succinctly. So, yes, pain has caused me to start looking inwards for answers and like the wise say, ‘all answers are within you.’

This is not to say that I’m going to ditch all my relationships. Not at all. Just that my dependence on them to give me happiness should be zero. Just as my dependence on anything external to me for my happiness should be zero. In reality, there is nothing external to me. The outside world that I see as outside me is merely a projection of my interpretation of it in my own mind. So, really, I should be saying, my dependence of anything that my mind conjures up should be zero. Which is really a smart thing to do. Because what the mind is conjuring up is merely a flickering movie the plot of which keeps changing every moment because the mind does not what it wants. Best to go beyond the mind, to the eternal reality, where no fickle happiness dependent on the mind is to be sought, but peaceful eternal bliss exists. Where joy is one undisturbed constant.

We tend to think that relationships are meant to bring us happiness, but actually they are meant to teach us lessons. And unless you are in a toxic relationship, in which case the lesson itself is to guard your dignity and walk out, I think one must stay and learn the lesson. Do the inner work, like removing all barriers to loving, respecting, accepting and forgiving oneself. That is of foremost importance. For unless we do that we cannot expect anyone else to do it to us. And once we do that, we stop expecting others to do it to us.

Weather lesson :)

Today was a strange day. I woke up to rain - pouring, driving rain. And wind. Buffeting, roaring, wind. The wind was a constant throughout the day. The rain came and went, interspersed by periods of sunshine. Clouds raced across the sky and the raindrops raced each other to pelt down on everything. When I went for a walk, the wind beat against my body and tossed the tops of trees into a mad dance. At home, the house shook sometimes to sudden extra-gusty winds and windows creaked in complaint. At times like these, in spite of all our technological advances, we begin to feel like marionettes. Mere stick-like figures that nature can break in an instant. And wipe off its path for good measure. It seems to say to us "Bah! who do you think you are? You infant on this planet ... strutting about, broad-chested... take this tsunami, this hurricane, this earthquake ... " And, of course, we never learn. Our ego never lets us. We continue to strut and preen and pretend we are the lords of all we see, until one day we manage to wipe ourselves off this planet. And nature, of course, goes on happily without us. Hah! And has the last laugh to boot :)

I am

I start to think, and I lose myself,
I stop thinking and I find myself.

please pause to ponder

Zara gaur farmaiye ...

Christmas is almost here, and contrary to popular belief, Xmas is not about Santa Claus or Xmas trees or plum puddings :) Xmas is about a cool dude called Christ who was so cool he asked us to follow only one rule and that is that we must love and only love, no matter who (friend/foe, black/white/brown/yellow, same/diff caste /community/country ....

So maybe we would be doing the good ole heart a big favour this Christmas by finding some time between the Jingling Bells and the opening of presents to look within and find all those things that prevent us from loving (our emotional heart-blocks) and maybe letting go of them, so that our hearts can do what it is meant to be doing - going dhak-dhak over everyone :))))

Like the other cool dude Rumi said "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it".

Cool season this, of loving and letting go ...

Elections 2011

It’s election time here and this weekend the country will go to the pools to elect a new government. In the run-up to that, TV channels have been telecasting debates and today I happened to watch the debate between the two leaders - the incumbent Prime Minister and the leader of the major opposition party. First off, what impressed me was the manner of the interviewer / mediator. No fuss, no bum-kissing, no sucking up. In true journalistic style, he introduced the participants and left them to do the talking and interjected only to cut short rambling speeches, ask pertinent questions, and call for breaks.

The two contestants were perfectly gentlemanly in their behavior. Each of them, with obvious pleasure, proceeded to point out the defects of the other party’s policies, shred to pieces their track records, and even pinpoint and highlight the gaffes and muddles the other has delivered in the past. And all this without raising their voice. For me, who grew up on the theatrics of that spectacle - the Indian Parliament, it was amazing. I sat there paying only scant attention as they discussed matters of national importance, just waiting for the drama to begin.

In the Indian equivalent, in a similar situation, the contestants would have been shouting down each other, papers, mikes, maybe even shoes would have been flying, and expletives would have to be silenced by the TV crew. It was such a great relief to have witnessed a debate with tempers kept in check, no drama worth reporting and matters conducted in the most civilised manner. It was a relief and an education.