Seeing

Movement of Meditation

2011-12-02T12:06:00.005+05:30

I was listening to the following talk by J. Krishnamurti on the movement of meditation:
http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-video/the-movement-of-meditation-full-version.php
He is trying to speak to us of the unspeakable. What I grasped listening to the talk two times is only that much I can comprehend within the limit of my individual consciousness, while he is speaking about the totality of consciousness that is overwhelming, limitless, boundless...

*****

The procreant urge of the writer

2011-11-22T12:00:00.003+05:30

The following is the link to something I enjoyed writing the other day, covering the Alchemist Hay Festival in Thiruvananthapuram for The Hindu. Frankly, I was not able to do full justice to the inspiring conversation between MT and Mukundan covered in this report:
http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/kerala/article2636287.ece

This is the text:

Urge and urge and urge--the procreant urge of the writer…
Where does it happen? How does it sprout wings and soar weightless into the skies?

Jnanpith award winner and one of the greatest living Indian writers M.T. Vasudevan Nair probed this subtle question in a conversation with modern Malayalam novelist and short story writer M. Mukundan at the inaugural session of the three-day Alchemist Hay Festival that began here on Thursday.

This literary and arts festival, bringing together creative minds from across the world for a kind of cross-pollination of thoughts, questing the mystery of the creative process, is being conducted here for the second time.

“How did I start writing,” MT, as Mr. Vasudevan Nair is popularly known, asked himself when the question was posed to him. He said he had this urge to read and read and read right from the time he was very young. His home is in a remote village in Palakkad district and, those days — more than 60 years ago — even the nearest school was 6 km away.

He recalled journeying to the town several kilometres away once on hearing a report that someone there had a copy of Changampuzha's book Ramanan, which was a new rage those days. The whole book was copied into a notebook and the printed one returned to its owner the next day.

MT said he was born in a lower middle class family. Reading Ezhuthachan's Ramayana each evening aloud at home was a tradition then. If a boy could do that the right way, the elders would say “he is okay; he is good.” Children used to be entrusted with the task of taking cattle down to the riverbank for grazing. On the way to the riverbank were paddy fields and the cattle were not to be allowed to nibble on the plants growing there. If one could handle the responsibility well, again the elders used to say “yes, the boy is okay; he is good.”

He then heard about a special issue of a literary magazine that had devoted an entire page to the photos of the leading writers of the time —Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, S.K. Pottakkad and a host of other writers. He climbed up and down the hills to another village to procure a copy. He cut that page and mounted it on a cardboard to preserve it. He used to wander around the silent expanses of the fields of the village and the riverbank, throbbing with an irresistible urge to write.

MT knew there was something exciting about the creative process. He had heard about Vaikom Mohammed Basheer selling his own printed slim volumes of fiction, going round the streets. “Here is something I have written. I am a writer. Will you buy a copy,” Basheer would tell those whom he met on the street. Changampuzha used to do the same thing to earn something so that he could pay his college fees. Why should they struggle like that? They were obsessed with writing.

If one were to get a poem through into a magazine, one dared not ask for payment. It was considered sacrilegious to ask money for a poem. Just the fulfilment of the process of creativity was a reward… Literature is a constantly evolving process… In content, craft, style, purpose and everything it continues to evolve with the forward movement of the gigantic flux that time is, MT said.

*****

The Challenger

2011-09-23T23:14:00.026+05:30

As i said, I had an enlightening time at the Cellar tonight, with me, beginning my intimacy with my first peg in a corner table alone so as to finish just that peg as early as possible and cruise home early, and then my friend Sankar sidling up to my side and, looking me needle-point piercing in the eyes, like the Ancient Mariner the wedding guest, saying,"Venu, there is a positive energy around you."

We are great friends and he draws a chair to my side and, tinkling his rum-and-water and winking his left eye, says, "You remember what we did the other day? I am 51 and you are 55. None of these boys can do what we can."

The other day, after his second peg and my third, Sankar revealed he could do Yogasana. I expressed disbelief, my lower jaw dropping an inch and eyes opening wide, for he is not the type on appearance a Yogi, whom you expect to look lean and hungry. Sankar looks well-fed, with the suspicion of a potbelly around his waist although that doesn't in any way diminish the debonair grace about him. To remove my disbelief, he moved to the clearing among the chairs to display, with technical perfection, the Sarvangasana, the all-body yogic posture.

[ Note: Sarvangasana involves keeping that part of the body below the shoulders upside down upright with the support the neck, the head and that part of the hand above the elbow, with the rest of the hands up to the fingers pressing strung below the chest taking the entire supporting pressure of the neck and the head the hand above the elbow, the whole life-force of the yogi holding forth to hold the balance of the upright poise of the rest of the body, with the toes pointing towards infinite bliss.]

"Can anyone do it," Sankar had challenged that evening. Everyone shook his head. The brandy-and-waters, the whiskey-and-sodas, the vodka-with-limes and the rum-and-waters shook their heads. Nearly 20 heads shook in a wave, like wind passing over a coconut grove. There were younger men in the Cellar and all conversation had died down and all were attentive to Sankar's display, but none dared take up the challenge. Nobody dared attempt the yogic posture on the battle field of the Cellar floor.

When the challenge had subsided and our friends started breathing easy, stirring the drinks in their hands preparatory to taking the next sips, I removed my watch from wrist and purse from pocket and moved to the aforesaid clearing among the chairs. The brandy-and-waters, the whiskey-and-sodas, the vodka-with-limes and the rum-and-waters put their drinks back on the tables. I fell on my knees, put that part of my hands above the elbow in a triangle on the floor and, taking a deep breath, swung my body into the position of Vritchikasana.

[Note: Vritchikasana involves holding the entire body in an arc, like a full-strung bow, with the face pointing floorward, but no part of the body other than that part of the hands above the elbows, with the fingers locked, touching the earth, the whole life-force within the yogi flung back into the empty space like a rainbow rising into the skies, where you can hear the rumble of thunder and see the electric flash of the lightening, beyond which is infinite energy and associated bliss.]

When I unwound the posture, all our Cellar friends raised their glasses and said whewwww.. whew-whew!!!

They all acknowledged that evening that I had passed the test to become Sankar's disciple. I touched his feet and was ordained his disciple that night.

That is the regard with which we see each other. Guru-Shikshya relation. He doesn't miss any opportunity to enlighten me on the unfathomable thing that is Yoga.

So Sankar sidles up to my side tonight also and this time speaks to me of spirituality from an entirely new perspective for some 45 enlightening minutes--the blunt and direct side of it, without being wishy-washy or anything like that... "ee jnanjha-punjha karyam thanneya ella evanmarum parayunne. I know all that, I can challenge any of them," he says, referring to what the sages of the past had said in their complicated ways.

Then he downs the remains of his third drink and orders another rum-and-water. "Eda makkale, edukkeda onnukoodi. Hey boys, give me one more."

*****

Spring abloom

2011-09-16T22:31:00.007+05:30

Driving home via my usual place after work in the night the thought that came to me was could I revive at the age of 55 my childhood dreams from the dust.

At the usual place my friend TNG said:

“Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome!
Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry,...”

He is a romantic, my friend TNG, and he was into his third drink. He is my own age, though with his lily white beard and hair and grave expression he looks several years older than me, according to my belief, which is a permanent thing of dispute between the two of us. His gruff voice belies the poet and lover in him.

I asked, can I, can I...
He said, yes you can!

My childhood dreams...

Can I, at the age of 55, revive from dust those old dreams,
Which i had forgotten
At some point or the other and had allowed myself
To drift, drift, drift and drift away...
Until all these years had slipped away...
Life itself had slipped away...

To the point now,
When I suddenly feel...
The dead roots coming alive...
The spring springing abloom!

*****

sleep

2011-09-06T08:26:00.002+05:30

the sky enfolds the night to its breast
and sleeps exhausted.
the earth slumbers in dreamless silence.

anklets removed from the dancer's feet
curl on the floor....

*****

Basho

2011-08-26T10:58:00.002+05:30

I want to share with you a haiku by Basho this morning.

I am quoting from the introduction of a book entitled 'On Love and Barley--Haiku of Basho' translated from Japanese by Lucien Stryk (Penguin Books):

It is night. Imagine, if you will, a path leading to a hut lost in a wildly growing arbour, shaded by the basho, a wide-leafed banana tree rare to Japan. A sliding door opens: an eager-eyed man in monk's robe steps out, surveys his shadowy thicket and the purple outline of a distant mountain, bends his head to catch the rush of river just beyond; then, looking up at the sky, pauses a while, and claps his hands. Three hundred years pass--the voice remains fresh and exciting as that moment.

Summer moon--
clapping hands,
I herald dawn.

Why I want to share this poem is because I feel it is possible to experience each morning as fresh as it really is...Born anew each morning; born anew each moment.

Have a great day!

*****

Soliloquy

2011-08-24T01:26:00.009+05:30

A discussion is a soliloquy within an undivided mind.
When the group mind is divided,
what we have intended as a discussion
becomes a debate.

In a debate,
there is violence involved.
The aim is forgotten in the fury of the violence...

*****

Laughter in deathbed

2011-08-20T11:04:00.025+05:30

This is something that happened three or four days before my father's death in September 1981. He had been in the hospital for nearly one-and-a-half months, aged 68 and sinking slowly to his end following a liver condition that was never treated. He carried the condition for a long time, swallowing aspirin tablets to control the pain, until it became so bad that he had to show it to a doctor, who put him in the hospital "to complete the final lap to death" (as he himself used to describe it).

Word spread that he was nearing his end and there was a steady flow of friends and relatives to the hospital to see him. My father was a journalist and a writer of short stories. He used to get his stories published regularly in English magazines those days. He wrote without any pretensions and the only purpose was to earn an extra Rs.100 or so to help keep the wolf a few more steps away from the door. He had a very large circle of friends in the town. Some of his friends were in the room on that evening when this incident took place.

The friends, as they are wont to in a situation like that, were cracking jokes, making things seem natural and casual, as though Unnithan Chettan (as they used to call him) would tomorrow step out of the hospital and join them for a couple of drinks at the club.

He was a person renouned for his sense of humour, but he was too tired that day and just lay there on the bed propped up with pillows, listening to them with no particular expression on his face, apparently too weak to join them in their light talk. He seemed to be under a cloud as well, which was quite unusual of him. It was as though he was weighed down by thoughts about his life coming to end within a few more days, or even hours.

Just then, Babu Chettan, one of my cousins a few years older than me, opened the door and came in. Only after he had stepped into the room did he realise the room was already crowded, that too with people who had the VIP label pasted all over them. In fact, they were among the dignitaries of the town--politicians, cultural personalities and such people.

My cousin brought with him the flavour and fragrance of a thousand boat race nights into the room (you should have lived in Alleppey, my home town, to know what this means), for he had treated himself liberally at a toddy shop en route to the hospital.

Everyone noticed the change in ambience. There was silence in the room for a few minutes and my cousin, rather self consciously, moved to the window and stood with his head dangling outside, as though inspecting something he had come to inspect from that vantage position.

"Babu," my father called, breaking the silence. His voice was that of a person addressing from his deathbed someone who is very dear to him, someone to whom he wanted to say goodbye with a catch in his throat. Everyone in the room was expecting an emotional scene as my cousin reluctantly obeyed him and came and sat on the side of the bed.

"It's such a long time, Babu," my father said, holding my cousin's hands. And he had that catch in his throat as he continued, after a pause: "Don't go away. Please sit a little closer... Let me enjoy the fragrance of it for some more time."

Then he closed his eyes to better enjoy the fragrance surrounding his nephew, with the air of a person having his final wish fulfilled. And the room erupted into thunderous laughter.

*****

The most difficult author I know

2011-08-18T13:34:00.004+05:30

This is how chapter XXII of Sri Arabindo's voluminous book 'Life Divine' begins:

".....He who knows the Truth, the Knowledge, the Infinity that is Brahman shall enjoy with the all-wise Brahman all objects of desire. (Taittiriya Upanishad).

Life is, we have seen, the putting forth, under certain cosmic circumstances, of a Conscious-Force which is in its own nature infinite, absolute, untrammelled, inalienably possessed of its own unity and bliss, the Conscience-Force of Sachithananda. The central circumstance of this cosmic process, in so far as it differs in its appearances from the purity of the infinite Existence and the self-possession of the undivided Energy, is the dividing faculty of the Mind obscured by ignorance. There results from this divided action of an undivided Force the apparition of dualities, oppositions, seeming denials of the nature of Sachithananda which exist as an abiding reality for the mind, but only as a phenomenon misrepresenting a manifold Reality for the divine cosmic Consciousness concealed behind the veil of mind...."

I have been off and on grappling with this 1,100-page book for the last six months and reached page No. 208 this morning.

Have a great day!

(Lesson: Take some heavy exercise in the morning. It will make everything seem so light during the entire day!)

*****

hornbill (a haiku moment)

2011-08-18T06:45:00.006+05:30

waking up in a tree hut
early morning deep in the forests
when the chill is on
and the light is a fluid movement...

i hear a hornbill...
then its echo...
muted.

*****

The only time my father beat me

2011-08-14T23:26:00.014+05:30

My father, who died in 1981 when I was 24, has beaten me only once in my life. He was a totally relaxed person. When at home, he would sit quietly in the veranda with a smile on his face, mulling over some pleasant and humorous thought, smoking hard on a beedi. He would be watching everything happening around him, but would not interfere in anything. We children could do any mischief in the house without fear of his raising his voice to enforce discipline.

I was six or seven years old when he beat me the only time in my life. I was playing goli in our front yard with my friend Mohan, who was around my own age. The goli game we used to play those days was similar in principle to the golf game. There are three holes in the ground about three feet apart and you have to put the goli in each hole a particular number of times ahead of your rival to win the game.

What you do each time your turn comes is to pitch the thump of your right hand at the spot where the goli had last come to rest and shoot it with your middle finger, as from a catapult, from between the thump and the next finger of your left hand. The goli has to be shot with the right precision to fall into the next hole. You are also allowed to hit your rival's goli with your's, so that it shoots far away from the holes, making it difficult for him to score his next hole.

I was a devil at this game and I won it by quite some distance that day. The rule of the game is that the winner is entitled to have a particular number of knocks with the goli at the knuckles of the loser as the reward for winning. The goli has to be propelled the same catapulting way from the first hole to the next, where the loser would hold his knuckles to receive the knock.

The moment I started sharpening the knife for my pound of flesh, Mohan started whimpering, his face a vivid red. The first knock landed spot on and he started outright crying, wringing his hand in pain. Suddenly my father sat up and shouted: "Eda Venu, venda! Stop!"

But I was entitled to some more knocks and was intent on having them all. Mohan placed his knuckles once again at the appointed spot to receive the next missile, because he was a proud little boy and could not think of backing out of the punishment he had to take. I bent down to take aim for the next shot at his knuckles and was suddenly sent face first into the sand by a resounding slap on my buttocks, my father having jumped out of the veranda to hit me. I had never seen him angry before and was so terrified that I ran away from the scene and did not dare come back until he had left home for the day's work.

The next day, he introduced us to a new way of playing the game. He had bought for us half a dozen new marbles from the town to play goli. The new rule was: no knocks at the knuckles of the loser. When a game is won and lost, the winner is entitled to two pieces of 'naranga mitai' (the yellow pear-shaped toffee of those days), while the loser will get only one. He placed a packet of these toffees on the steps of our home and asked us to start playing. He had bought the toffees too from the town the previous day for the specific purpose of changing the rules of the game.

(Why do I write this piece now? I just happened to remember him this morning.)

*****

NSG

2011-07-31T19:07:00.014+05:30

"Years back my second son during his college days had this poster in his place pasted to the wall which read: I HAVE BEEN BEATEN, KICKED, LIED TO, CUSSED AT, SWINDLED, TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF AND LAUGHED AT...THE ONLY REASON I HANG AROUND THIS PLACE IS TO SEE WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT."

This is a mail my friend, guide and Guru in the institution where I have been working for the last 33 years sent me the other day to announce he and his wife had completed 50 years of married life. I am reproducing it in my blog with his permission. NSG, as we lovingly call him, continues:

"When we shifted our Madras home I removed the poster and kept it with me. He is fond of sending wedding anniversary greetings to us. He selects funny cards and once the caption in the card was 'TO A COUPLE OF NUTS'. I thought I must inform you that we have accomplished a feat--we have completed 50 years of married life. Fifty years of happiness, sorrow, suffering, turmoil, peace, sacrifice, accusation and above all some sort of sweet satisfaction that 50 long years have gone by amidst the turbulant life we had. Life still goes on with all these. No regrets because what a life can be and should be was lived with the available resources, contentment and satisfaction. God has been kind to us all these years and was with us without fail, guiding us."

I know NSG from the time I was 21 years old. I had slept on the floor in his humble, furniture-free home those days. We used to sit deep into the night on the mirror-neat cement floor talking. His three sons, who were school-going kids then, are now in very good positions in different corners of the world, as happy as only the children of such parents could be. NSG's influence on my life is something even he is not fully aware of.

Just wanted to share my happiness with you.

*****

knock knock knock

2011-07-23T22:32:00.003+05:30

knock knock knock!
a speckled moth!!
wanting to come in!!!

*****

'soppam'

2011-07-21T10:00:00.015+05:30

"appooppa vava soppam," she said this morning over the phone from kannur far away. "grandpa, i saw you in a dream!"

what a way to start the day!

*****

beyond language

2011-07-17T07:32:00.016+05:30

i do not know the language of the song i listened to this morning on a u-tube link on my friend MTaI's blog:

but listening to the music and watching the scenes unfolding i heard the song saying this:

when someone dies somewhere
it is part of me that dies
when a child is born somewhere
it is me... being born again....

her post is on the Mumbai bomb blasts:

http://m-t-a-i.blogspot.com/2011/07/with-deepest-sympathy.html

Stuntman

2011-06-28T08:30:00.025+05:30

The faded picture here shows me as a stuntman in an old Malayalam movie. I polevaulted on to the 10-foot-high wall of a fortress in that film for Prem Nazir. In the picture you see me wearing Nazir's costume. I was studying third year BSc at that time. The entire class, including four of our teachers, had come to see the shooting of me jumping over the leaping fire in the moat around the fortress to reach the top. It was a crucial scene. On reaching the top of the fortress and vanquishing a demon rested Nazir's chances of winning Sheela's hand. He pulls out a flagstaff, his expression displaying his determination and lunges forward. From that moment the shot is from behind and I take over the action. I did the jump clean first chance. Looking back I see how risky it was. There would never have been a second chance. The entire shooting crew applauded when I landed on top of the fortress. My classmates too applauded. Among them was a girl whom I had loved from the time we were in school. I remember seeing her eyes sparkle when stunt director Thyagarajan hugged me for the perfect jump. "My hero!" her eyes said...

I found this picture the other day when I was searching for my certificates among my old papers. The writing at the bottom-left corner of the frame says the picture was taken on February 5, 1977. Jijo Punnoose (son of Navodaya Appachan and director of 'My Dear Kuttichathan') took the picture. It is his handwriting. He was one of my classmates. There were four of us always moving as an inseparable team while in college. He was one of them. Another team member Anil Surana is now a prosperous businessman in Bangalore. Anil, after leaving college, acted in a couple of Jijo's films. The fourth was Raju, whose daughter Navya Nair is a very fine film artiste--in fact, the leading heroine of Malayalam movies until two years ago when she stopped acting following her marriage.

The girl with the sparkling eyes about whom I spoke is now a grandma. In the class the day after the shooting, Jijo gave this photo to her. You may notice that the photo is slightly torn at the bottom left corner. I had tried to snatch it from her hands, causing the damage. She had preserved the picture all these years along with our certificates and some other miscellaneous papers, including certain very embarassing poems I had written to her those days.

Life is beautiful, isn't it?

*****

flux

2011-06-25T13:41:00.007+05:30

i am floating free on the crest of a gigantic flux--
i am a wave-riding water skater.
free and weightless i glide,
twisting and turning and rising and falling i glide,
on the crest and trough and crest of this flux,
gigantic flux,
the free flowing one that started with my birth,
much before,
much much before,
the one that started much before my father's birth,
even before the birth of intelligence on earth,
before even the birth of the concept and the word...

thus i float
on the crest of this gigantic flux...
remembering,
suddenly,
from where it all started--
knowing,
suddenly,
where the flux is taking me.

*****

across my porch

2011-05-14T07:24:00.010+05:30

a formless remorse floods in...

i unwind each count
all the way down to one
and find
an unending procession of ants
across my porch
on some timeless mission
this morning.

*****

one

2011-05-05T06:24:00.002+05:30

indivisible,
though as if
divided in beings (Gita)

*****

voices

2011-05-01T08:35:00.003+05:30

in the resounding emptiness of my skull,
i hear voices,
like marbles
dropped into a copper vessel.

*****

being aware of your breath

2011-03-14T17:12:00.003+05:30

i have been monitoring the different levels of meditation possible for me to explore and, joyously, something new came up this morning, from insight received from a book i am reading.

it is about being aware of the breath. when one inhales a deep breath, one is aware of taking a deep breath... when one exhales a deep breath, one is again aware of exhaling a deep breath.

then we conceive breathing as a phenomenon of the body; we keep on conceiving breathing as a phenomenon of the body. we find our entire body breathing...

then we conceive breathing as a phenomenon of the mind; we keep on conceiving breathing as a phenomenon of the mind. we find our entire mind breathing...

then we conceive breathing as a phenomenon of our sensuality; we keep on conceiving breathing as a phenomenon of our sensuality. we find ourselves breathing with all five senses of our being...

breathing is a phenomenon that takes place "here and now," the awareness of which fixes us totally to the place and the moment.

the here-now feeling...
with the breathing conceived and realised as a phenomenon of the body, mind and sensuality...
and with the awareness that breathing is the truth of what is here and now,
we breathe on and touch another level of meditation.

*****

caption

2011-03-02T17:48:00.002+05:30

the next turn...
they come and go; they come and go:
a compound wall in thiruvananthapuram being erased of the memories of last year's panchayat elections to receive the dreams of the latest of the dreams of the years to come.
april 13 is the date of the Assembly elections in kerala.

(this is a caption for a picture my friend ratheesh took for our paper today. i thought of putting it here since i like the ring of the thing.)

spell

2011-02-08T11:38:00.007+05:30

i was listening to the Buddha speaking
about the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch
and about thought that can bring to reality all these senses from the void,
thereby tethering us to the self,
and about the freedom that is there to be gained
by cutting the chain that anchors us down,
the chain that is the total of thought and the five senses,
the cutting of which is death,
and i was sitting thus on the steps of my house
meditating
when he opened the gate and came in and stood before me
hot from the sun,
picking the post addressed to me from the bunch of letters in his left hand,
and a bird from the tree overhead shot its droppings
and the droppings fell splashing down his cheek to his shirt front
and i felt the whole of his discomfort,
a distress at the bird that had flown away
and the warmth of the droppings on his cheek
and together we went to the tap to the right of the house
and i helped him wash his face
and brush his shirt front clean sprinkling water
and we stood smiling at each other
full of love for the bird and everything
and then i looked at the letter he had handed over to me...
and the spell
broke.

*****

love and hate

2011-02-06T08:00:00.003+05:30

i was wondering whether a total transformation is possible.
each one of us has an outward looking eye
that perceives so many other entities all around
that have to be named and graded
according to the best of our individual convenience,
comfort, sentiment, ideology...
everything boils down to the 'me.'
i am the person who is central to everything
when i say i love this and that,
or when i say i hate.

*****

new year

2011-01-05T17:35:00.004+05:30

happy new your to all my friends!!!
i am engaged in a fight where total focus of mind is necessary.
so i am keeping out the blog from my attention.
hope to write about this experience soon, and also visit other blogs to see what my friends are doing.
the ongoing experience is not the new. Arjuna might have experienced it aiming his arrow at the eye.
i am watching what is possible if you turn weightless,
nothing distracting you,
no gravitational pull excercising its influence on you,
no fear touching any corner of your heart,
nothing mattering,
you turn just into a flame burning smokeless.

*****

A truly religious person

2010-11-21T17:19:00.009+05:30

It was my good fortune the other day being asked to cover for my newspaper an interaction between Dayabai, a social worker, and the media in Thiruvananthapuram. What struck me from the very beginning of the exchanges was the feeling that here was a woman who was on the verge of enlightenment. I use the word 'verge' to underline my feeling that she still was not fully settled and peaceful in the poise of her being--her quest was still not over--but she seemed well on the way to conquering those final steps also. I copy here the story I had written for The Hindu issue dated 18th November:
*************************************
In search of truth… in tribal land

How Dayabai transformed herself and the people around her.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Life is message:Human rights activist Dayabai and documentary film-maker Shiny Jacob Benjamin at a meet-the-press in Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday. –

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: What moves Dayabai, the woman soldiering on alone in her quest for something? What is her quest?

A discussion with Dayabai, who lives among the Gonds of Chhindwara district in Madhya Pradesh showing them the way out of exploitation, was organised by the Trivandrum Press Club on the sidelines of the release of a documentary on her life here on Wednesday.

She was Mercy Mathew when she left home in Kerala's Kottayam district at the age of 16 to join a convent to become a nun more than four decades ago. She gave up the convent life to study social work as a subject, do a bit of teaching and then lead a wandering life as a social worker. She had kept moving and her journey had taken her to Mother Teresa, Bangladesh and wherever she thought she could find truth.

When asked, she said she had never been able to stay for more than one-and-a-half years anywhere. At a very young age, what struck her about relationships was how there was an imposed gap between one person and another, between one entity and another — the separateness that was keeping things apart. She thought a nun's life was her calling, but in the convent she found this separateness there also. There was the hierarchy and the gradations that go behind all institutions.

She said whenever she was in doubt she would go to the Bible and therein read what Christ had said. Religion was something that happened within each individual and she knew she had to find her own truth.

Finally among the Gonds in Madhya Pradesh she reached. Dayabai said they were once a community belonging to the ruling class among the tribal people there. They had a tradition and culture of their own. But they had been alienated from much of their land and they were under severe exploitation.

“One remark I heard during my initial days with them was very striking. One of them asked me why I should stay with them who were like monkeys in the forests. They had lost the pride of their identity,” she said.

Mercy Mathew became one of them and assumed the name Dayabai. She felt one with them in all senses, but she had to remove the separateness that was in the tribal people around her also. How she transformed the people around her was the theme of the documentary Ottayaal taken by Shiny Jacob Benjamin, a journalist.

Dayabai's life is being seen as something depicting the theology of liberation in practice.

Asked about this, she said such interpretations were being given by others. Religion happened when one became part of the whole struggling life.

And what does she fear, she was asked. “All these cameras,” she said, sweeping her hand in the direction of the cameramen covering the interaction. She was wary whether it would change her small life.

*****
link: http://www.hindu.com/2010/11/18/stories/2010111863530400.htm

back home

2010-11-05T23:22:00.002+05:30

my son was back home today from bangalore third month into his first job, lean and clean eyed.

he brought neha a toy, a dog that rolls paw over paw, shaking its head, when dragged by a string;

his sister a watch and his brother-in-law a shirt;

his mother a mobile phone

and his father two books--'Communism & Zen Fire, Zen Wind' and 'Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi'-- both by Osho,

and a Peter England shirt,
in which i looked handsome
in the mirror.

*****

right lighting conditions

2010-10-24T07:26:00.004+05:30

a crow,
the full-black species we have in our countryside,
cawed at me from a bough
and i found
myself walking in the sun,
back-lit and sparkling
against the background of a sprinkling of wild flowers,
fresh from an early morning drizzle.

he clicked me now with both eyes intensly focussed
over his beaks,
now with the left eye and now with the right,
from different angles,
excited,
like a wildlife photographer
accidently encountering the tiger
in the forests
in the right lighting conditions.

*****

Time and Space

2010-10-18T11:27:00.019+05:30

"There are still these questions baffling me," Sashi* told me, not because he was actually baffled, I am sure, but because he wanted to probe what my answers would be. "Is there something called Time? Is there something called Space?"

He told me he wanted a simple answer. If he were to ask me whether I was thirsty, I would answer him 'yes' or 'no'. If I wanted to drink a glass of water, I would know it spontaneously. I would not have to think and select the appropriate answer from my accummulated stock of knowledge and experience. He said he wanted such a spontaneous answer.

However, instintively, I started thinking for the answers, because thinking is a habit we nourish and carry with us as an extremely important quality in life. We are not used to acting spontaneously. We think, calculate and then act. We introduce the time-and-space factor into all our responses.

I told him: "The last time we met, you told me about looking at things without giving names to anything I see. I have tried it. I see my wife, but I don't give her a name. I don't give a name to our relationship either. I see a cow grazing in a valley, but I don't limit either the cow or the rest of the scenery to names and symbols. I don't allow my brain to go into its trained function of decoding from memory the impressions that reach it, giving each impression a name, reducing each impression to a symbol...There is a strange stillness and a flooding in of something when that kind of seeing happens, which is not always. Then everything becomes fresh and new, with neither a past, nor a future. Everything IS. In that stillness, is there 'Time', is there 'Space'?"

Sashi was amused by my answer. "You can also answer my question by posing the same question back to me," he said, laughing.

"Why do we have this concept of Time and Space," Sashi asked. "Isn't it a creation of thought, the basic nature of which is to seggregate, compartmentalise and grade the seggregated entities in different ways, pitting one entity against the other and grouping some entities together, arranging all these in an order in our mind in Time and Space?"

[*Sashi is an old friend. Some of my other friends are of the view that our discussions with him should be recorded. I had a one-to-one discussion with him on Friday.]

*****

The night we discussed suicide

2010-10-02T10:56:00.015+05:30

My friend had come from a place on the outskirts of the city and was waiting for me at the gates of my newspaper office when I finished the day's work and came out around nine in the night.

"Where to," I asked him. He said he knew a toddy shop some distance away, where we could get very good toddy. It was a little way off my route home, but I had decided to give that evening to him shelving everything else I had planned.

We were silent as I negotiated the city traffic. When the road cleared, he said he had come to meet me to discuss the question of suicide. He wanted to commit suicide. Then he thought I was the kind of person with whom he could talk about it.

The toddy shop was not crowded and we could have continued the discussion there without much fear of being overheard. But he was silent through our first bottles.

"Let us go out into the highway," he suggested. So we got a plastic can loaded with toddy, borrowed a couple of glasses, and set off towards the highway. I parked the car at a dimly lit place on the side of the road.

We talked for nearly two hours, spilling quite a lot of toddy in the car. The car was going to stink like a toddy godown tommorrow, I thought...

Our very serious discussion on suicide, as was quite inevitable in such circumstances, was punctuated by frequent references about the quality of the toddy we were drinking. He had big influence with that toddy shop, though he was not a regular drinker. "Any time you feel like having good toddy, Venu, you tell me. I can arrange it for you," he said. We both laughed when he said that.

We also discussed, in between our discussion on the subject of why he wanted to commit suicide, our common problem of always wanting to be recognised--within our families, within our social circles, among our friends and within our organisations. The desire to be spoken well of by others and understood by all for our good intentions and how all these are basically the result of our own habit of being totally immersed in ourselves.

He was extremely emotional at the start of our discussion. When the story unfolded, he would now and then break out into laughter seeing how his mind had been at work right from the time of a simple incident in the morning to make it snowball into something so shattering that he saw no longer any purpose in living. We talked about this funny quality of the mind and marvelled at the way the mind worked.

We were now on a high and he asked me whether I had any old Malayalam songs to put on the music system. When I said I had no music system in my car, he said not to worry, he would sing a couple of songs himself.

He sang beautifully and his face was all music and expression in the light of the headlights of the vehicles that moved past us along the highway. There was still some toddy left in the can and as I filled the glasses without spilling, a police patrol jeep, red lights and all, rounded into our side and stopped.

I opened the car door and stood outside. An officer climbed out of the jeep and walked to the car to inspect want was on.

"We are having a little toddy," I broke clean. "I finish work very late... Errr.. the other chap is my friend... He too is drunk," I confessed, adding, "we were discussing a serious issue..."

The officer blinked a torch into the car. He saw my friend's beaming face, the plastic can, the toddy-filled glasses, the mess on the dashboard...

He switched off the torch. "Okay, okay," he said, curt and very official. "That's enough. Pack up, go home." They had been watching the car parked on the side of the highway during their patrolling the past couple of hours.

"Certainly, sir, right this moment," I said, getting immediately back into the car. The police jeep followed us for a couple of kilometres to make sure I could hold the wheel and, reassured, turned back.

"Venu, did you notice the policeman's face? What a lovely face! I felt like kissing him. Isn't it a wonder he should understood the seriousness of what we were discussing? Isn't it a wonderful world?" My friend was delirious in his happniess to be in this world.

It was well past midnight when I dropped him home. The door opened the moment the car stopped at the gates. Both his wife and daughter were at the door. They were waiting for him to return.

I could see them smiling from ear to ear as he sang out good night to me and, with meticulous deliberation to keep his steps steady, started walking towards them.

*****

i belong

2010-09-22T22:35:00.004+05:30

i belong to the blood
that pulsates in your heart
and gushes
through your arteries,
to the odour of your sweat,
to the moisture in your breath,
to the deep recesses of the earth
from where your roots
drink in the salt of the soil
and spread triumphant your boughs
towards the sun,
i belong.

*****

None of these

2010-09-11T08:50:00.006+05:30

I am not the real me,
though now I live variously
the role of a son,
a husband, a father, a grandfather,
a somebody with a name and an address,
a friend, an opponent...

I am the sum total of all these
and the sum total of something else
and still I am none of these.

*****

letter to a friend (3)

2010-09-07T11:46:00.009+05:30

I was very close to Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai when I was working as a reporter for my paper in Alappuzha. Whenever he wanted anything to be written in English, he used to call me to his residence, give me very good food and dictate to me his ideas. I remember taking from him notes for a keynote address he was to present at an international seminar on creativity in New Delhi and also a few articles for magazines including that of the paper for which I work.

He was a very deep person, although, on the surface, he looked just an ordinary Kuttanadan farmer. I believe that is what makes him a great writer, being very light and ordinary. He was not comfortable with English--his English was like the document writer's (just as his Malayalam is, as some critics might say). He will say what he wanted to say in Malayalam and I will come back the next day with the English version of what I thought he wanted to say.

Looking back, I now realise I had done most of these translations without really understanding the full meaning of what he had told me in Malayalam. He was very indulgent. When I bring to him the neatly typed speech or article the next day, he will read it minutely, ask a question or two, add a comma or semicolon here and there and say: "Ithu dharalam mathiyeda (This is more than enough)." I used to even take a little freedom in translating, which I now know I should not have.

Being so close (he was also my father's friend), I took the liberty of asking him once: "Chetta, ethinte guttence entha? What is the secret? How do you go about writing a short story?" (See, I was not overambitious. I wanted to start it in a very small way...and then graduate into big things like novels, perhaps).

I asked him whether his practice was to get up early in the morning and read something like a story or two of Maupassant to fall into the rhythm before starting on a story. Or is it late in the night, after everyone had gone to sleep and one had gazed at the moon for some time, that the writing begins to flow? I have tried both these and many other methods, but somehow I cannot break into the trick of writing a story.

He slowly removed the veins of a betel leaf with his finger nail, added lime and powdered areacacut to it and put the combination into his mouth. He had stopped taking tobacco with pan those days. He sat chewing and thinking for a long time. A dog was ambling slowly across the compound. Thakazhi Chettan lifted his chin so that the betel juice would not spill from his mouth and told me to throw a stone at the dog.

Anything he says, I will do with alacrity. I jumped out and, like Jonty Rhodes flashing in to effect a runout, picked up a stone and flung it flat at the dog, factoring in the dog's movement too. (My subject in college was Physics and, further, I was a cricketer and a very good fielder in my young days).

The throw was spot on, but the dog, when just a whisker's breadth was left for the stone to hit it, leaped to a side in mid-stride to render my effort null and void. Perfectly cool. It even gave me a sidelong glance and a smirk before wriggling its way under the gate out of the compound.

On resuming my seat on his verandah, I found Thakazhi Chettan laughing. "Did you see how he did it? To be creative, you should be like him."

I thought he was making fun of me.

But now I know what he meant was to keep it light and weightless. Some of you are naturally, without your knowing it, in that position. Some others, whatever their talent, will not be able to deliver it, because they cannot touch that zero-gravity orbit.

To know the position of that orbit is important. It is important to know the difference it makes to the quality of your being, your creative existence, when you are in that position of weightless agility.

When we know the difference, it may even become possible for us to navigate through distractions to that orbit, responding to the demands of the world around us with total creativity...as, if I am not mistaken, you are doing without your knowing it.

*****

staying connected

2010-09-01T01:07:00.005+05:30

can we stay connected
vertically and horizontally
in time and space?
knowing one another's pulse
and the pulsebeats of everyone gone
and everyone hence to evolve?

then is immortality!

*****

peace

2010-08-26T23:58:00.007+05:30

alone along the well-lit city street walking
in the dead of the night,
i find all sediments
settled in sleep
at the bottom of the glass;
but yet, there from the sidewalk shadows,
a light churning,
a chuckle,
someone...
laughing in his dream.

*****

brink

2010-08-22T00:23:00.003+05:30

reading over the notes in my dairy
these recent times
i find myself shrinking
to the leanest
existing
on thin air
floating
a feather at equilibrium
an inch away from altogether
vanishing

*****

Sermon on the Mount

2010-08-21T06:35:00.006+05:30

Even the reserved bogies were crowded. As the train chugged into Kozhikode station, there was a family of five, including a breast-feeding baby and a child of three or four years, with no reserved space in the cubicle meant for eight others who were already there with reserved berths.

There was hush-hush talk among the reserved passengers how the Raiways could like this permit unreserverved passengers into reserved bogeys. If it were to be like this, why should there be a system at all for booking berths?

Around 8 p.m., after having an early supper opening a packet he had brought in his bag, the pastor climbed up the side-upper berth saying since the train would reach Kottayam just after 1 a.m., he should try to catch some sleep.

Six other reserved passengers too put their berths into position and folded up for the night, leaving the remaining one reserved passenger to allow the unreserved family to sit on the lower-side berth that was his.

What the heck, he was thinking. Staying awake one night would not shatter you. He went to the side where the latrines were and inspected the narrow space by the wash basin. The floor was fairly neat. Even if he were to become too tired standing, there was this option.

The ticket officer made his appearance for a second time around 9 p.m. and was speaking to the unreserved family about his helplessness. He said all he could do was to give his sleeping spot for the children and their mother. "Tell me what else I can do. When you travel with a sick child to the RCC, don't you know you should reserve? You would have even got priority in booking."

It transpired that they were taking the elder of the two children to the Regional Cancer Centre for treatment. Those lying in their berths were immediately alert. Three of them, including the pastor, were soon on their feet persuading the young mother of the two children, her father and brother to take their berths.

The pastor and the three other reserved passengers sat packed on the side lower berth. They did not talk about the sick child now sleeping on the side-upper berth with his uncle. As the train rocked and swung on its wheels, the pastor kept those seated by his side awake speaking about Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. The moon shone on the rushing night landscape outside.

*****

kiss transformation

2010-08-11T23:48:00.008+05:30

i have destroyed my two-decade-old beard the other day,
because my grandchild neha has started kissing my cheeks.

*****

phenomenal

2010-08-01T06:42:00.012+05:30

there is this me in me spreading
weightless into the immeasurable,
watching dispassionately
the phenomenal me
exploding in a fit of passion.
i see myself
arguing the particular, drilling home an irrefutable point,
seggregating, comparing,
quoting the provisions of the temporal
and asserting the cause of the vital...

there is also this me in me merging wide into the infinity
and seeping deep into the infinitesimal,
from my immutable stillness watching
the phenomenal me
in a very hot turmoil.

*****

A novel in progress

2010-07-24T10:13:00.003+05:30

My son Vishnu, on reading the first few pages of my first novel, asked me: "Accha, have you read Paulo Coelho's 'The Zahir'?"

When I said no, he went to his bookshelf and brought out the book.

I read four or five pages and realised what I had in mind might be the same as what Coelho had. From the way it begins, I understood 'The Zahir' is about a husband finding one fine morning his wife had vanished without leaving a trace. My novel in progress begins with a character finding his lover missing a few days before they are to get married.

I must admit it was bit of a shock. I felt the same way I had felt when an apple fell on my head some time back prompting me to expound the laws of gravity. But the patenting officer looked up the records and said: "Tough luck, buddy. Another chap has done it already."

"Don't lose heart," my son told me, seeing the expression on my face. "The thing to do is to finish what you have begun. Then read 'The Zahir', if you have't already".

He also advised me not to put my novel on the blog. He said it might as well win the Nobel. And Nobel winning books are not usually posted on the blog due to the new Cyber Laws. He is more into current trends; he knows better.

So, I am closing the blog http://www.gopalvedam.blogspot.com/ where I had started posting 'Whirlpool', my novel in progress. The rest of the novel I propose to write in the seclusion of my room here and my son shall not enter this room and touch my computer.

*****

oarless

2010-07-09T18:41:00.005+05:30

floating oarless
down the river...the clouds, teals,
hold still the raft.

***

metamorphosis

2010-07-09T06:28:00.005+05:30

it is a passion bubbling up from the depth of my being--
i just cannot describe it...

all my life i had hated eating fish.
but now, wonder of wonders,
i like nothing but fish--breakfast, lunch and supper!

and comes this pleasant shock after much pondering over:
a cat i have become, a cat!

*****

scowl

2010-07-08T23:24:00.003+05:30

she scowled
for no reason
as i passed her on the street!

how dull
the world would be
should each girl sport a smile!

*****

belligerence

2010-06-04T22:50:00.010+05:30

three of my friends following this blog ask me why there has been no new postings for the past many days. it is not true i was too busy to find time for the blog.

i was just not weightless and at the zero these past 10 days. when you are not at the zero there is no creativity in you.

conflicts arise when you are too involved. your involvement does not tolerate threats, not even little disturbances. you are like a tigress guarding its cubs.

this condition makes you tense. the mind is restless and no longer mirrors the truth. and i have kept my blog the mirror of the truth i see.

how to get out of it is the challenge...

watch yourself. keep watching yourselves as though you are another person, dispassionate and uninvolved. attachment is the issue; it is the problem. it makes you belligerent, a separate entity in conflict with the whole.

this belligerence can cease only when you know the essence of karma yoga. i know it at the theoretical level, but knowing it at the theoretical level is different from knowing it deep within.

*****

cyclone (total transformation)

2010-05-25T14:29:00.009+05:30

the atmosphere is stacked layer over layer from sea level upwards into the regions of nothingness.

the cyclone is when all layers are involved in a total spiralling movement, from bottom upwards layer after layer past the vent into nothingness.

it is an unhindered sublimation of energy, a spiralling into the beyond.

once the monsoon currents have fallen into their pattern there will be no cyclones because a strong and steady current will be flowing from east to west at upper levels creating a lid that closes all approach for the winds spiralling at lower levels to the opening into the total freedom beyond.

under enforced limits there can only be limited manifestations of creative expression.

in meteorology these limited manifestations are called low pressure systems, depressions and deep depressions.

these drive the rains and serve ground level purposes but since the lid is on at a particular level the spiralling beyond into the stage of the cyclone is not a natural thing to happen in the monsoon season.

how analogous monsoon mateorology is to creative expression in life regimented within limits set at different levels from person to person, circumstances to cicumstances!

a cyclone is possible only when we break the lid and take all the individual levels of our being, physical and mental, spiralling into the supraphysical and supramental regions of the unknowable.

this is what Sri Aurobindo teaches in his Integral Yoga--total transformation.

*****

monsoon night

2010-05-23T20:13:00.001+05:30

a fruit bat circling
my cherry tree, the crickets
chirping rain happy...

*****

screensaver

2010-05-22T07:04:00.008+05:30

her smiling face is my screensaver.
each time i switch on the computer she lights up the screen her smile.
she has a dimple on her left cheek,
a twinkle in her eyes
and a reflection playing on the softness of her lips.
her temple is the shrine holding the hidden knowledge
of all ages past, all ages yet to come.
my screensaver is the mirror of the truth of everything.

*****

cheers!

2010-05-21T22:38:00.006+05:30

these days i find myself moving as though delicately balancing a large sheet of thin glass on the pinpoint of my head, without the prayerful support of my palms, as brittle and vulnerable as that, the slightest puff of the wind can be my undoing, and yet i carry it off some days, just imagine the bubbling exilleration of it, when at the end of the day, i pour soda water into a peg measure of brandy, and say, unto the world, cheers!

(my friends don't know what makes me so happy!)

*****

hero

2010-05-16T15:15:00.003+05:30

like the fielder at deep long off,
moving in from the boundary line
as the bowler begins his runup,
and when the batsman hits, hard and low,
swooping in and diving full length
to pouch the ball,
just half-an-inch above the ground!

and then glowing in the glow of the gallery!

*****

zero

2010-05-16T07:46:00.017+05:30

to put yourself at the zero position is a difficult thing to do.
when there, you glide like an eagle high in the clouds,
gliding,
not a feather moving,
moving into the mist of the clouds,
and then gliding into sunlit surprises,
blinking,
seeing all things moving and static on earth,
seeing with the eyes of the eagle,
and when the prey scurries, far down below,
acting,
acting with a tilt and flap-flap of the wings,
and swooping in to lift the thing
clean off the ground.

*****

immortality

2010-05-13T07:00:00.005+05:30

what we feel as individual life is the flick of a flame in an immense conflagration. the flame is born in the conflagration and vanishes into the conflagration and in its passing lights up all the flames that are yet to come. only when we know the immensity of the conflagration we know the individual flame, its footing in eternity and its immortality. the flame now harmonises the light of that which had passed on behind and that which hence shall shine forth.

*****

"She desires the ancient mornings and fulfils their light; projecting forwards her illumination she enters into communion with the rest that are to come."

Kutsa Angisara--Rig Veda.

listening

2010-05-11T06:58:00.013+05:30

in the silence of the morning

a cuckoo...then a cow from a long distance away,

playing their different tunes...

like when you sit at the veena, dearest,

probing the notes of a new composition,

me, on the floor, listening.

*****

the other end of the gradient?

2010-05-09T22:41:00.002+05:30

too few words one uses,

for fear of the word distorting the real;

but it has the danger of putting the whole thing

at the other end of the gradient

where it will not roll.

*****

until the showers came

2010-05-08T06:18:00.007+05:30

until the showers came, i knew not of the countless ripples on the stillness of the lake, each running in concentric circles against the outward pushing circles of those around.

and when the rain intensified, i saw the ripples dancing into a frenzy and pushing themselves harder against one another, harder against one another...

and you said: only the drop not with the ripples know the depth and spread of the lake.

*****

love in times of cold

2010-05-02T21:59:00.003+05:30

long journey, bad cold--

the girl in the facing seat

smiles each time i sneeze!!!

*****

knowing

2010-04-30T07:41:00.019+05:30

there is a conducting wire running between us, each end charged and receiving, the flow alternating by turns, yet static in its motion.

know of this in quick-spreading tentacles flowing like rivulets to everything around--the trees that grow in the valley and the birds that fly in the air, the people in the throes of a plethora of emotions and them that have no emotions, the why and the wherefore of it, and also the boy, watching the chameleon, its flower neck bellowing, your heart ticking...

you know you know the moment he will transfer the toffee-stick from his right hand to left and pick up the self-same stone you now see lying there on the road at his feet and you know when he will, with a flinging swing of the whole of his body, agile as a catapult, send it shooting to destination.

and yet you know the chameleon, with a flicking leap a whisker and a whiff of touch distance away from woe and perdition, will smooth sail over to the branch yonder and disappear...

*****

perfection

2010-04-26T11:26:00.018+05:30

i fall on my knees and take your palm in both hands and, pressing it to my lips, plead: make me perfect!

make me perfect as a perfect square, a perfect circle, a perfect sphere--let it be as you wish. let me be as soft clay in your hands. mould of me your ultimate art.

with your fingers you twist my ears till it pains and then you push me back and skip your way down the slope, leaving me alone on the hillside. as the skies darken and the stars come out, i turn into a night flower, petal by petal, flowering...

*****

"it manifests itself in...the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality"--Sri Aurobindo.

*****

creativity

2010-04-23T22:01:00.010+05:30

the sublime heights of creativity
is where there is no gravity.

there you are like a satellite floating
in a geo stationary orbit,
not of this world and yet of it,
invisible,
acted upon by no outside force,
moving with the world in a state of perfect rest
in relation to everything over land, sea and air.

it is like when you step out of your palace
in the dead of the night
and you wander into the wide open spaces,
come to a river,
take a dip and sit under a tree,
with your legs crossed, eyes closed and spine straight,
turning weightless into a flame,
burning smokeless.

*****

solidity

2010-04-22T18:08:00.012+05:30

the wind blowing into us,
flapping through our coats,
the sun blinding into our eyes
through the canopy of the trees,
backlit,
fanning their heavy boughs
as we pass,
each step a tangible solidity
in the solidity of the immutable,
you and i,
neither apart,
nor in any modulated differentiation in the odour our sweat,
panting...

*****

reverse gear

2010-04-19T07:16:00.006+05:30

now that we speak of the foetus
growing in your womb,
suckled by the love of our ancesters,
now that we speak of the sun
and the earth and the planets,
hurtling down the milky way,
of time shrinking to this moment,
let us stop,
take a break,
and consider this:

you and i flow in a linear direction,
from point 'a' to 'b' to 'c',
from a foetus in the womb
to a newborn baby to a bubbling little child
to the time when we were in deep love
to a mom and grandma and then to dust.
how would it be if life were to flow
in the selfsame linear direction on the reverse gear,
from point 'c' to 'b' to 'a',
from dust to grandma to mom and the girl of my dreams
to the bubbling little joy i knew you were in childhood
to the bliss you were as a baby
to the no-mind expanses of a foetus...

hand in hand, dearest,
we swift-sail down the milky way.
see--there is the sun, here the earth
and there the other planets
and a million million twinkling stars.

*****

when i see you thus in tears

2010-04-18T14:19:00.008+05:30

when i see you thus in tears,
dearest,
i place myself in the context of everything
that had happened in the untraceable history of existence
and everything
yet to happen in the eons to come,
as the sun and the earth and the other planets
swift-sail down the milky way
on their journey
without a destination.

i curl myself into this moment,
a foetus,
and vanish,
along the placenta linking heartbeats,
into the throb of your pulse,
the taste of the salt of your cheeks,
and the pain of the little toe
you had just now stubbed
against this sharp stone
by the wayside.

*****

at your touch

2010-04-15T11:10:00.006+05:30

at your touch i turn into a bubble,
a bubble,
balanced,
on the tip of a thorn,
on a windless night,
the moon shining high.

*****

michelangelo

2010-04-13T22:03:00.004+05:30

another day,
i open the creaking doors of the attic
at the abandoned house,
and amidst the cobwebs,
old trunks, broken furniture and brass vessels,
find the masterpiece,
rolled up and neatly tied.

i unroll the canvass,
stretch its corners straight,
and the picture hits me like a blast and i reel,
struck by a resemblance
engraved in memory.

later,
at the art gallery,
i linger long looking for faces
lighting up with recognition.
but the women come and go,
talking just of michelangelo...

*****

distrust

2010-04-11T06:25:00.001+05:30

lie with me,
you jingle,
tell me lies.
when only the truth you speak
all the time,
those random lies of the past,
they all turn true!
that kind of trust i distrust!

*****

the secret

2010-04-10T23:43:00.000+05:30

thus with a smile and a promise
you take me down the hills from deep woods
into an open meadow,
where graze eighteen cows, their butter-bright sheen,
shining,
luminous on the dew-wet green,
sunlit distilled still,
of all times gone and all times yet to come,
four-dimensional...
and as we pause breathless, you tell me,
listen...listen...
don't you hear, a sound?

*****

at the centre of nowhere

2010-04-08T07:35:00.000+05:30

then you take me to a place at the centre of nowhere,
where we see
all sights for the first time,
hear the sound of music for the first time.
we link our hands,
and neither you nor i have a name anymore,
our breath is the breath of the wind,
our blood the sap of the earth.

*****

union

2010-03-23T07:09:00.000+05:30

together we ascend and descend
on this joyous swing.
bouncing our feet on earth and leaping back,
we stretch our length from toe to head
skywards
and fling ourselves down swinging high,
and when we touch the free spaces where gravity stops,
you whisper in my ear:
"this is both jugum and yuj."

then starts the learning of new languages.

*****

procrastination

2010-03-18T07:44:00.002+05:30

procrastination is my basic tendency. it had been hovering over me on light wings right from childhood and prompting me lovingly into the ducking byeways of deferment at every point. until there is an absolute crisis, i cannot act.

these three days early morning, i open a book at page 460, intending to finish the last 25 pages in one sitting. then i close it deciding to finish it the next day.

*****

deafening silence

2010-03-10T16:03:00.000+05:30

deafening silence!...
which means
someone has spoken the truth.

***

To my friends

2010-01-16T22:12:00.000+05:30

Pardon me for being callous. I read hardly any of your poems or articles these days. My granddaughter is home, with her mother and grandmother from Scotland. I am in a different orbit.
She is all smiles all the time, except when she is sleepy, or in lip-smacking mood for milk. She likes you speak to her little nothings and responds expressively, making noises that are most appropriate.
It is not as though you spend all your time with her. God fills you to the brim and you have no more space for poetry.

*****

new year

2010-01-01T10:14:00.000+05:30

new year stands waiting,
till the last cracker has cracked...
then it ambles in.

***

falling...

2009-12-31T22:59:00.000+05:30

a momentous year
just gone by--still, i, bobbing,
hurtle down the fall...

*****
happy new year to all my friends!

click

2009-12-29T09:52:00.000+05:30

this morning on the roof of my house i found a new nook.

a place where everything was new!
the perforated parapet streaking across in splashes of light and shadow to the right,
the flowing silhouette of a slanting palm balancing the frame to the left,
birds flying their different ways across the sky...

and i found a totally new answer to an old riddle!

*****

transcendence

2009-12-27T22:48:00.000+05:30

from dawn past into the midnight
we were on the cliff
overlooking the lagoon,
speaking nothing, watching
the fishermen flowing out with the ebb tide,
returning heavy with the evening tide,
and,
under the moon,
we found the ebb and flow,
out and in,
frozen
to the beyond.

*****

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-25T12:14:00.000+05:30

I got this SMS greeting from a friend today and forwarded it to many friends:

He had no servants--yet they called Him the Master;
No university degrees--yet they called Him the Teacher;
No medicines--yet they called Him the Healer;
No army--yet the kings feared Him;
He won no military battles--yet He conquered the whole world.
So we celebrate the birthday of this great hero of all times, JESUS...
Merry X'MAS!

I cannot put it in better words. Merry Christmas to all my friends!

*****

Writing

2009-12-20T08:59:00.000+05:30

Experimenting with different ways of placing words in relation to one another, I have now come to the position that going straight for clarity is the best way of communicating.
What I mean is, don't think you have to be vague to make it sound a poem, don't consciously do that. But vagueness can also come when you try for the exact, because truth is that which cannot be put into words and the more words you use for clarity, the farther away from truth you go.
That is why the Bible is so full of parables, the great ones had always spoken in parables. You understand what I tell you, don't you?

*****
(This is a comment to a nice poem by my nephew and I think there is sense in it for all my young friends on the blog.)

life

2009-12-20T07:04:00.000+05:30

like a thin twisting
wisp from a lit incense stick--
fragrance now and gone.

***

lest i forget

2009-12-20T06:44:00.000+05:30

every body continues in its state of motion or rest,
unless acted upon by an outside force.

the outside force can be
in the nature of one's conditioning,
the conditioning of those around you,
or both in effervescent interaction.

how to steer ourself through this street,
without bumbing into one another
and injuring ourselves,
injuring our creativity,
injuring the feeling of being happy,
is also a test.

*****

Why I blog

2009-12-19T09:13:00.000+05:30

This is a slightly polished version of a comment I posted today in reply to another comment against one my pieces. I am putting it as a separate post since it is about why I blog.
I started this blog in August 2008 when I was in a kind of trauma (with a badly shaken ego), the details of which are irrelevant now.
Round about the same time I started going deeply into Krishnamurti and Osho and I started seeing what was wrong.
I started noticing that when I have an agenda or a desire all creativity in me is dead. The mind moves in two directions, either to the past or to the future, either weighed down or elated by what had happened in the past, or worried or spinning grand schemes of the future.
This process, whichever way the movement of the mind, bogs one down. One is not light and free to respond to the moment, neither in the profession, nor in personal life. It is very difficult to make the mind still. Only when the mind is still, I started noticing, can there be creativity.
This blog I started with the intention of watching this watching process in me, although there are other trivial things also in it. It is something for myself, and my friends on the blog are helping me along.
Thank you.

*****

leisurably

2009-12-16T20:58:00.000+05:30

trying to stay sober
in the company of some of the most polished
gentlemen in the city,
after a couple of drinks,
can be tricky.

but a sudden thought sends a bolt
into my head:
does it really matter,
whether i'm sober or not
this night?
especially when i'm with
such a lovely gang of lovables in straight jackets
carrying a burden that never is,
especially also mr. pompous-hompous,
the company chief?

and suddenly i melt into the party
and tickle them all
by turns in the ribs
with rowdy jokes and greasy fingers,
for i am alternately eating
using no forks,
and forks and spoons and spoons and forks
get mixed up all the way...
nobody anymore can keep count how many.

we wake up the next morning,
each one at different hours, of course,
may be with a headache or two,
otherwise okay, if you know what i mean...
i in my bed...
well, i must confess,
i'm not too sure about mr. pompous-hompous!

the last i see of him...let me remember...
he stops his car...
at the city square...
under the statue...
emptying his bladder leisurably over its feet...
yes, singing like the dickens, throwing his head up,
into the night air,
the selfsame song of unrequited love
i had sung hugging him at parting time,
to the clapping of hands by the whole gang
of his obsequious subordinates.

he was empying thus at the feet of the universe,
singing my song till hearts should break,
when a police jeep...
lights circling,
came slowly c.l.o.s.i.n.g... in.

and i was cruising along the other side of the road...
silently.

*****

The deep resonance of poetry

2009-12-15T09:10:00.000+05:30

I am sharing this article I had written for my newspaper with my blogger friends since it is about a 'poetry slam' to be held in Thiruvananthapuram this evening. My reading of Basho had come in to help me add colour to this piece.

This is the link: http://www.hindu.com/2009/12/15/stories/2009121558510300.htm

*****

A little finger

2009-12-15T07:55:00.000+05:30

How complicated we have been making out our country to be!
Such a relief to learn, reading the newspaper, that Yuvraj Singh's injured little finger (of the left hand, which powers his merciless hitting of the Sri Lankan bowlers) is India's biggest worry on the 15th of December, 2009.

The match begins at 9 a.m., Indian Standard Time.

*****

the ball

2009-12-14T12:11:00.000+05:30

the ball,
a sphere of leather hexagons
sewn tight in black and white,
its bladder pumped to the right temper,
lies in the middle of the indoor stadium,
totally at rest.

i take a run-in and kick it,
with a nice swing of the right foot,
and it sails
and hits the wall and bounces back
bum bum bum bum bum...
dribbling,
rolling round and round
and settling,
chuckling...
now, totally at rest.

*****

north wind

2009-12-06T14:16:00.000+05:30

whirl!
my girl's saree fringe
swirls,
round my face it
furls...

blow again, north wind!

*****

abuzz

2009-12-04T07:44:00.000+05:30

no, no, not this tap--
ants busy winter hoarding
yesterday's tidbits.

*****

i-look

2009-12-03T10:54:00.000+05:30

"baby lakshmi-look!"

"scowl ambi-look,
brow sajo-look,
brains i-look."

*****

(an sms communication between my cousin brother and me after his seeing my grandchild's photo e-mailed to him.)

karthika

2009-12-01T20:23:00.000+05:30

karthika lights blink--
our temple back home--should be--
glowing devotion!

*****
(karthika is the annual day of the deity of our family temple in the village. on that day we light oil lamps all around the sanctum santorum and all our family people, from far and wide, come to worship the Devi in the golden glow of a thousand lamps. when a child, i used to be a leading player of the whole show, especially in lighting the lamps and ringing the temple bell at the time of deeparadhana. it is also a day of family reunion. today is karthika. this time i could not go. the day came to me while driving home in the night after work and finding the houses on either side lit by karthika lights.)

*****

the Truth

2009-11-30T22:27:00.000+05:30

the response of the moment
is the truth of the moment;'
but we falsify the truth
by guiding the response.

*****

nothing happened

2009-11-30T06:35:00.000+05:30

dearest,
nothing happened
the whole evening.
there was no sunset,
rain clouds
heavy in the skies...

you didn't come, it didn't rain.
only the sea... restless.

***

(an old love letter)

a teardrop

2009-11-28T23:05:00.001+05:30

my reflection
in a teardrop...
i hold your face and kiss it
away.

*****
(an old piece)

an apple...for you

2009-11-28T22:57:00.000+05:30

just this big--
maybe even less--
encapsulating the whole universe
in a palpitation

*****
(an old piece)

A Letter

2009-11-27T22:34:00.000+05:30

For days it was as if I never existed.
You have blotted me out of your world
Like a wilted flower from your vase.

I have treasured our unuttered pledges:
Rising with your name as a prayer on my lips,
Breathing the morning breeze,
Marveling,
Oh God,
Isn’t this the same fragrance my dear one breathes!

I waited beneath your window last night,
My heart aflutter in the moonlight
For a rustle at the curtain,
The fleeting glimpse of a shadow...

Throughout you kept it shut.

*****

(This is another poem from my teenage days, when I was terribly in love with a girl, who, as it turned out, became my life partner subsequently. Slightly edited because of the age factor and my present status as a grandfather.)

*****

Continuum

2009-11-27T08:48:00.000+05:30

You will never tell me, will you,
What blessings you sought,
What silent wishes,
Hands folded in prayers yesterday
In the Sacred Grove of our delusions.

You merely smiled.
The peacock spread its plumes
And danced for me.
A whole constellation of stars
Shifting...
Oh, our star-crossed love!

*****

This is something I wrote when I was around the age of 20. I looked it up from an old notebook this morning when a beautiful poem by Binu, a fine young poet in our circle, reminded me of the old days. It is a continuum all the way. Nothing has changed. I am posting it here without editing it, deleting not even expressions such as 'delusions' and 'star-crossed love,' which I would have rather avoided now.

*****

the fly

2009-11-27T07:20:00.000+05:30

now i hear of a religious man who,
having lost all his hair from chemotherapy for cancer,
thinks it over and finds how
he can turn the whole affair to his advantage
saying
he had gone worshipping to the shrine where we shave our hair
as an offering to the Lord.

*****

grandpapa

2009-11-26T06:02:00.000+05:30

baby girl!
the phone rings one minute past five a.m.

i open the door...
a streak of daybreak in the east;
the birds,
still drowsy in their perch...

clap-clap-clap,
thrice i clap my hands...

*****

hoeeeyy!

2009-11-25T06:44:00.000+05:30

hoeeeyy! hoy-hoeeeyy!
from lane the fishmonger's call--
five cats reach him f-i-r-s-t!

*****

nestlings

2009-11-20T23:50:00.000+05:30

all day up the hill
on wobbling legs we climbed
to reach the elephant rock
and crawl our way to the top
at sunset to look
down the final ledge
into an eagle's nest!

*****

friends

2009-11-20T09:49:00.000+05:30

i turn the corner
in my car--the stray dog! smiles,
makes way, i smile back.

(smack in front! sorry,
he said, and moved to the side,
its all right, i said.)

*****

Silent Valley

2009-11-19T14:09:00.000+05:30

For us to understand our relation with the whole we have to step out
of the sterilized hum of our air-conditioned cabins and go to an
untouched evergreen valley that had evolved over several millions of
years.

There we encounter the silence of eternity. We hear the soft touch of
our feet on the dead leaves that carpet the ground and then we skip a heartbeat as a bird rustling the canopy in flight startles us…

We freeze a moment watching the bird take perch on a sagging vine and
swing, wipe its beak against the vine from left and right, cock its
head askance at something, preen its feathers to enjoy an itch, and
fly away again, flashing to us the full glory of its plumage.

We find ourselves smiling… What bliss!

Now we hear a langur somewhere calling khu-khu-khu-khu and a stream
gurgling down the fold of the valley. The answering khu-khu-khu-khu
comes from another direction and we are in the middle of a grand
concert--birds, squirrels, and so many other lovely little
creatures we don't know have joined in!

We have never been part of such celebration all around… We have never
known this is how it has always been and suddenly we see the now of
the moment flowing down from millions of years to fill us and
overwhelm us…

And how cool and fragrant the air we breathe! We kneel down and kiss
the Earth...

In this Silent Valley is the whole. We have so withdrawn ourselves
into little cabins of our ambitions, worries, greed and hatred that we
have never known the love that only the whole is.

Silent Valley is like the first man on Everest, because it showed that
the Everest of insensitivity in the self-enclosed modern mind, which
spells doom for the entire Earth, can indeed be conquered.

Many more mountaineering victories have followed over the last 25
years since its declaration as a National Park. Many more will follow.

And it is for all times to come. We have only to take to
this place the people who decide the destiny of our survival together on
Earth for them to see what is and what is not. A lightening bolt of
austerity will strike them to change their vision on development.

*****

(Note: On November 21, conservationists and nature lovers are meeting in Silent Valley to celebrate the 25th year of the victory of their campaign to save the pristine evergreens of the area.)

*****

sleepless

2009-11-18T08:00:00.000+05:30

frogs vociferous,
as night rain leaves...the loudest
must be tortoise-large.

***